10. That annoying Linus character from the Peanuts cartoons would be killed off
9. New fashion style: Scantily clad females, even in twenty below weather
8. Forget Disney World, say hello to Penguin World!
7. Late Show with Linus Torvalds
6. High schools offer classes on kernel hacking
5. Microsoft stock certificates traded as rare collectors' items, along with
Confederate money and Roman coins
4. Beowolf Clusters for everyone!
3. Computers no longer come with reset buttons
2. United States of Linusia
1. Three words: Open Source Beer

Missouri Town Changes Name to 'Linux'

LINUX, MO -- The small Missouri town of Linn, county seat of Osage County,
announced yesterday that it will be henceforth called 'Linux'. Mayor Bob Farrow
said, "Linn needed something to put it on the map. A few weeks ago my daughter
mentioned that she installed Linux on her computer and how great she thought it
was. I thought to myself, 'Self, changing the town's name to 'Linux' could be
an opportunity to attract attention -- and money -- to our town. We could even
hold a Linux Convention at the community center.' So I approached the city
council about the idea, and they loved it. The rest is history."

Farrow's daughter is organizing the Linux Linux User Group. She hopes to be
able to hold a Linux Convention this fall. "The Linn, er, Linux community
center probably won't be big enough, we'll probably have to hold it in nearby
Jefferson City," she said.

The mayor does have one reservation. "How the hell do you pronounce Linux?" Oneof the mayor's contenders in the next election, Mr. Noah Morals, says he will
start an ad campaign calling Bob Farrow "the Incumbent Liar of LIE-nucks".
Needless to say, the mayor usually pronounces Linux as "LIH-nucks".

Linux Rally Held in Pennsylvania

HARRISBURG, PA -- Thousands of Linux advocates gathered at the Pennsylvania
state capitol building earlier today. They were protesting the state's recent
three year deal with Microsoft to install Windows NT on all state computer
systems. "Whatever pointy haired boss made this deal ought to be shot on
sight," one protestor exclaimed. "Windows NT is a piece of [expletive] compared
to Linux. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania are going to be sorry three years from
now when this 'deal' concludes. The state has sold its soul to Satan [Bill
Gates]."

Brief hostilities broke out when a group of police officers armed with riot
gear descended on the protestors. After the police threatened to use tear gas,
the protestors threw thousands of Linux CDs at them. Once the supply of CDs was
depleted, the protest became peaceful again. "I saw several policemen pick up
Linux CDs and put them in their pockets," one protestor noted.

The protest broke up a few minutes later once it was realized that the state
legislature wasn't in session. "We may have wasted our time today," one
advocate said, "But we'll be back later." State and Microsoft officials were
unavailable for comment at press time. How typical.

"CmdrBurrito" Launches Slashdot.org Parody

An anonymous hacker with the handle "CmdrBurrito" has launched a parody of the
Slashdot "News for Nerds" site entitled Dotslash. Dotslash has the motto
"Snooze for Slackers. Stuff that Scatters." It has fake news articles and
ficticious reader comments. Some of the recent articles include "Bill Gates
Wins Powerball Jackpot," "Linux 2.1.666 Released," and "Supercomputer Created
from 8088 and Z80 Computers." Rumor has it that "CmdrBurrito" plans to create
parodies of other sites, including Linux Weekly News ("Linsux Weakly Snooze"),
Freshmeat ("Deadmeat"), and Linux.org ("Linsux.org").

When asked about Dotslash, Slashdot webmaster Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda said, "No
problem. I simply posted an article about it on Slashdot, and watched it die
from the 'Slashdot Effect.' Six hours later, and it's still offline. I suspect
Dotslash is running Windows NT. The mystery 'CmdrBurrito' character is probably
a bored Microsoft employee."

'Kitchen Sink' OS Announced

Coding has begun on a new operating system code named 'Kitchen Sink'. The new
OS will be based entirely on GNU Emacs. One programmer explained, "Since many
hackers spend a vast amount of their time in Emacs, why not just make it the
operating system?" When asked about the name, he responded, "Well, it has been
often said that Emacs has everything except a kitchen sink. Now it will."

One vi advocate said, "What the hell?!?! Those Emacs people are nuts. It seems
that even with a programming language, a web browser, and God only knows what
else built into their text editor, they're still not satisfied. Now they want
it to be an operating system. Hell, even Windows ain't that bloated!"

Mad Programmer Commits Suicide

KENNETT, MO -- For two years Doug Carter toiled away in his basement computer
lab working on his own 'Dougnix' operating system. Apparently he was sick of
Windows 95 so he decided to create his own OS, based loosely on Unix. He had
developed his own 'DougUI' window manager, Doug++ compiler, DougFS filesystem,
and other integrated tools.

All was going well until last week when he hooked his computer up to the
Internet for the first time. It was then that he stumbled on to www.linux.org.
Reports are sketchy about what happened next. We do know he committed suicide
days after, leaving behind a rambling suicide note. Part of the note says:

"I've wasted the past two years of my life... Wasted... Gone... Forever...
Never return to. [illegible] Why did I bother creating my own OS... when Linux
is exactly what I needed!?!?!?! If I had only known about Linux! Why someone
didn't tell me? [illegible] Wasted! Aggghhh!" [The rest of the note is filled
with incomprehensible assembly language ramblings.]

Red Hat Unveils New Ad Campaign

Linux distributor Red Hat has announced plans for a $650,000 ad campaign. The
ads will appear on several major newspapers as well as on a few selected
websites. "These ads will be targetted towards Windows users who are fed up but
aren't aware of any OS alternatives," a Red Hat spokesman said. "We feel that
there is a large audience for this."

One of the ads will be a half page spread showing two computers side-by-side: a
Wintel and a Linux box. The title asks "Is your operating system ready for the
year 2000?" Both computers have a calendar/clock display showing. The Windows
box shows "12:00:01AM -- January 1, 1900" while the Linux box shows "12:00:01AM
-- January 1, 2000". The tagline at the bottom says "Linux -- a century aheadof the competition."

Open Source Beer Revolution

Yesterday, Red Hat introduced an 'open source' beer called Red Brew. The
recipes for making the beer are available for free over the Net, and
microbrewery kits are available at low cost from Red Hat. Says a Red Hat
spokesman, "With the proliferation of free (open source) software, it was only
a matter of time before open source beer became reality. After all, the only
thing hackers like more than free software is free beer!"

Following the Red Hat annoucement, other companies are racing to launch their
own beer 'distribution'. Caldera is developing an OpenBrew beer. Meanwhile,
Patrick Volkerding is working on a SlackBeer distribution, and DebianBrew is
expected soon.

Traditional breweries and beer distributors are not thrilled about open source
beer. "This is ludicrous! People want beer that comes from time-tested, secret
recipes -- not beer from recipes invented overnight! Open source is a fad," a
spokesman for Buddwizzer Beer, Inc. said. In addition, other beverage
distributors are nervous. "First open source beer, and soon open source soft
drinks! Before we know it, we'll have RedCoke and SlackPepsi! This open source
plague must be stopped before it eats into our bottom line! Don't quote me on
that last sentence," the CEO of Croak-a-Cola said.

Linux Infiltrates Windows NT Demo

SILICON VALLEY, CA -- Attendees at the Microsoft ActiveDemo Conference held
this week in San Jose were greeted by a pleasant surprise yesterday: Linux.
Somehow a group of Linux enthusiasts were able to replace a Windows NT box with
a Linux box right before the "ActiveDemo" of Windows NT 5 beta. "I have no clue
how they were able to pull off this prank," a Microserf spokesman said. "Rest
assured, Microsoft will do everything to investigate and prosecute the Linux
nuts who did this. Our bottom line must be protected."

Bill Gates said, "I was showing off the new features in Windows NT 5 when I
noticed something odd about the demo computer. It didn't crash. Plus, the font
used on the screen wasn't MS San Serif -- trust me, I know. My suspicions were
confirmed when, instead of the "Flying Windows" screensaver, a "Don't Fear the
Penguins" screensaver appeared. The audience laughed and applauded for five
straight minutes. It was so embarrasing -- even more so than the pie incident.

One attendee said, "Wow! This Linux is cool -- it didn't crash once during the
entire demo! I'd like to see NT do that." Another asked, "You guys got any
Linux CDs? I want one. Forget about vaporware NT." Yet another remarked, "I
didn't know it was possible to hack Linux to make it look like NT. I can
install Linux on my company's computers without my boss knowing!"

Tux Penguin Beanie Baby Sales Skyrocket

Two weeks ago Ty released a 'Tux the Penguin' Beanie Baby. Sales of the stuffed
toy have exceeded expectations. All 100,000 of them have been sold, and it will
be another week before more can be produced and distributed. Tux is now the oneof the most valuable Beanie Babies, with some stores selling remaining ones for
over $500.

Tux's strong sales constrast sharply with Ty's other computer-related Beanie
Baby, 'Billy the Billionaire'. "Billy's sales are dismal. Except for the 2,000
that Bill Gates bought for himself and his daughter Jennifer, Billy has been a
failure. People just aren't responsive to toys that represent greedy,
capitalistic billionaires with bad haircuts," a member of the Church of Beanie
Baby Collecting said.

Ty is considering releasing other Beanie Babies similar to Tux. Some
possibities include 'Steve the Apple Worm' and 'Wilbur the Gimp'.
"Computer-related Beanie Babies are selling extremely well," a Ty spokesman
said. "I don't understand why people are obsessed with these stupid stuffed
toys. But as long as they're making me lots of money, I don't care! Oops...
Please don't quote me on that."

ARE YOU ADDICTED TO SLASHDOT?
Take this short test to find out if you are a Dothead.

1. Do you submit articles to Slashdot and then reload the main page every 3.2
seconds to see if your article has been published yet?
2. Have you made more than one "first comment!" post within the past week?
3. Have you ever participated in a Gnome vs. KDE or a Linux vs. FreeBSD
flamewar on Slashdot?
4. Do you write jokes about Slashdot?
5. Do you wake up at night, go to the bathroom, and fire up your web browser
to get your Slashdot fix on the way back?
6. Do you dump your date at the curb so you can hurry home to visit Slashdot?
7. Do you think of Slashdot when you order a taco at a restaurant?
8. Are you a charter member of the Rob Malda Fan Club?
9. Did you lease a T3 line so you could download Slashdot faster?
10. Is Slashdot your only brower's bookmark?
11. Do you get a buzz when your browser finally connects to Slashdot?
12. Do you panic when your browser says "Unable to connect to slashdot.org"?
13. Have you even made a New Year's Resolution to cut back on Slashdot
access... only to visit it at 12:01?

Microsoft Acquires Nothing

REDMOND, WA -- In an unprecedented move, Microsoft refrained from acquiring any
rival companies for a full week. "I can't believe it," one industry analyst
noted. "This is the first time in years that I haven't read any headlines about
Microsoft acquiring something."

The lack of Microsoft assimilation this week left a vacuum in computer industry
publications. "Microsoft acquisition stories make up 10% of our headlines," an
editor at Ziff-Slavis said. "We had to scramble to fill this void. We ran some
controversial Jessie Burst columns instead, hoping that we could recoup ad
revenue from people reading all the flames in the Talk Back forums. Jessie
Burst forums account for 15% of our total ad revenue."

Stallman's Latest Proclamation

Richard M. Stallman doesn't want you to say "Windows" anymore. He is now
advocating that people call this OS by its real name:
Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows. This proclamation comes on the heels of his
controversial stand that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. RMS explained in a
Usenet posting, "Calling Microsoft's OS 'Windows' is a grave inaccuracy. Xerox
and Apple both contributed significant ideas and innovations to this OS. Why
should Microsoft get all the credit?"

RMS also hinted that people shouldn't refer to Microsoft's web browser as IE.
"It should really be called Microsoft-Spyglass-Mosaic-Internet-Explorer. Again,
how much credit does Microsoft really deserve for this product? Much of the
base code was licensed from Spyglass."

Many industry pundits are less than thrilled about RMS' proclamation. The
editor of Windows Magazine exclaimed, "What?!?! Yeah, we'll rename our magazine
Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Magazine. That just rolls off the tongue!" A
Ziff-Davis columnist noted, "Think of all the wasted space this would cause. If
we spelled out everything like this, we'd have headlines like, 'Microsoft
Releases Service Pack 5 for Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Neutered Technology
4.0' Clearly this is unacceptable."

Linux Drinking Game (Abridged)

With a group of friends, take turns reading articles about Linux from popular
media sources (Ziff-Davis AnchorDesk is recommended) or postings on Usenet (try
alt.fan.bill-gates). If the author says one of the things below, take a drink.
Continue until everyone involved is plastered.

- Linux will never go mainstream
- Any platform that can't run Microsoft Office [or some other Microsoft
"solution"] sucks
- Linux is hard to install
- Linux tech support is lacking
- No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft
- Any OS with a command line interface is primitive
- Microsoft is an innovative company
- Could you get fired for choosing Linux?
- Linux was created by a bunch of snot-nosed 14 year old hackers with acne and
no life
- Security through obscurity is the way to go
- Linus and Unix are 70s technology while NT is 90s technology
- All Linux software must be released under the GPL
- Linux is a great piece of shareware

Tux Penguin Boxing Match

LAS VEGAS, NV -- The unofficial Linux mascot Tux the Penguin will face his arch
rival the BSD Daemon in a boxing match this Saturday night. The match is partof the International Computer Mascot Boxing Federation's First Annual World
Championship Series. The winner will advance to face one of the Intel "Bunny
People".

Boxing pundits favor Tux as the winner. Last week Tux won his first match in
the Championship Series against Wilbur the Gimp. "The Gimp didn't have a
chance," one spectator said. "With Tux's ability to run at top speeds of over
100mph, I don't see how he could possibly lose." The BSD Daemon, however, is
certainly a formidible opponent. While boxing rules prohibit the Daemon from
using his patented pitchfork, his pointy horns are permitted in the ring.

Some observers think the whole Computer Mascot Boxing Federation is a fake.
"WWF is all scripted," one sports writer pointed out. "And so is this. You
actually think that a penguin is capable of boxing? The idea of a penguin
fighting a demon is patently absurd. This whole Championship Series has no
doubt been scripted. It's probably nothing more than two little kids in
penguin and demon suits duking it out in a boxing ring. What a waste of time."

Increased Electricity Consumption Blamed on Linux

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The US Department of Energy claims Linux is partially
responsible for the increased demand for electricity during the past year.
Electricity use was up 2.5% from January to September of 1998 compared with
the same period in 1997. "While some of the increase can be attributed to
higher temperatures over the summer," one Department bureaucrat explained,
"Linux is certainly a contributor to the increased demand for power."

When asked for clarification, the bureaucrat responded, "In the past, most
PCs have been turned off when not in use. Linux users, on the other hand,
usually don't turn off their computers. They leave them on, hoping to
increase their uptime to impress their friends. And since Linux rarely
crashes the entire system, those computers stay on for weeks, months, even
years at a time. With Linux use continuing to grow, we expect demand for
electricity to increase steadily over the next several years."

In response to the news, several utility companies have announced plans to
give away free Linux CDs to paying customers who request them. One anonymous
executive said, "The more people who use Linux, the more power they consume.
The more electricity they use, the more money we make. It's a win-win
combination." Yesterday Linus Torvalds was nominated as a candidate for the
Assocation of American Utility Companies Person of the Year.

Could You Get Fired for Visiting Slashdot?

PADUCAH, KY -- Matt Johnson, an employee at Paradigm Shift Consulting, Inc.,
was fired from his programming job because of his addiction to Slashdot.
Johnson typically visited Slashdot several times a day during working hours.
Citing productivity problems, Johnson's boss gave him the pink slip and
instituted a 'NoDot' policy -- no visiting Slashdot or related sites from the
office, ever. Now Johnson has filed a lawsuit, claiming that his Slashdot
addiction is protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Matt Johnson explained, "They discriminated against me because I'm a Dothead.
Drug abuse and alcoholism are often considered handicaps. Why not Slashdot
addiction?" Johnson's boss sees the situation differently. "Matt never got
any work done. He was always visiting Slashdot, Freshmeat, or some other
nerd website. And when he wasn't, he suffered withdrawl symptoms and
couldn't think straight. A few months ago he spent eight consecutive hours
posting comments in a KDE vs. GNOME flame war. I tried to offer assistance
to overcome his addiction, but he refused. Enough is enough."

The company's 'NoDot' policy has been under fire as well. One anonymous
employee said, "We can't visit Slashdot because of Matt's addiction. This
just sucks. I really don't see anything wrong with visiting Slashdot during
breaks or after hours."

Computer industry pundits applaud the last minute switch from Windows to
Linux. One said, "I was a bit concerned for Homer. With Windows CE, I could
easily imagine Homer slipping into an infinite loop: "General Protection
Fault. D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh..." Or, at the worst, the Blue Screen of
Death could have become much more than a joke."

Some pundits are more concerned about the quality of the Intel CPU. "Linux
is certainly an improvement over Windows. But since it's running on a
PentiumBrain chip, all bets are off. What if the chip miscalculates the core
temperature of the power plant where Homer works? I can just imagine the
story on the evening news: 'Springfield was obliterated into countless
subatomic particles yesterday because Homer J. Simpson, power plant
button-pusher, accidentally set the core temperature to 149.992322340948290
instead of 150...' If anything, an Alpha chip running Linux should have been
used for Homer's new brain."

Operation Desert Slash

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- High officials in the US military are planning on putting
the 'Slashdot Effect' to use against Iraq. Pentagon computer experts think
that the Slashdot Effect could topple key Net-connected Iraqi computer
systems. Such a Denial of Service attack could prove instrumental when the
US invades.

One Pentagon official said, "If I had a million dollars for every server that
crashed as a result of being linked on Slashdot, I'd be richer than Bill
Gates. The Slashdot Effect is a very powerful weapon that the US military
wants to tap into."

Rob Malda has been contacted by top military brass. According to anonymous
sources, Malda will play a key part in the so-called "Operation Desert
Slash". Supposedly Malda will post several Slashdot articles with links to
critical Iraqi websites right when the US invasion is set to begin.
Meanwhile, Pentagon operatives will begin a series of Denial of Service
attacks on other key Iraqi computer systems. One source notes, "Since many
Iraqi systems rely on Microsoft software, this task should be relatively
simple."

Linux Dominates Academic Research

A recent survey of colleges and high school reveals that Linux, Open Source
Software, and Microsoft are favorite topics for research projects. Internet
Censorship, a popular topic for the past two years, was supplanted by Biologyof Penguins as another of this year's most popular subjects for research
papers.

"The Internet has changed all the rules," one college professor told
Humorix. "Nobody wants to write papers about traditional topics like the
death penalty, freedom of speech, abortion, juvenile crime, etc. Most of the
research papers I've seen the past year have been computer related, and mostof the reference material has come from the Net. This isn't necessarily
good; there's a lot of crap on the Net. One student tried to use 'Bob's
Totally Wicked Anti-Microsoft Homepage of Doom' and 'The Support Group for
People Used by Microsoft' as primary sources of information for his paper
about Microsoft."

A high school English teacher added, "Plagarism is a problem with the Net.
One of my students 'wrote' a brilliant piece about the free software
revolution. Upon further inspection, however, almost everything was stolen
from Eric S. Raymond's website. I asked the student, "What does noosphere
mean?" He responded, 'New-what?' Needless to say, he failed the class."

The Movement Formerly Known As Open Source

The battle over the Open Source trademark is heating up. Software in the
Public Interest and the Open Source Initiative both hold competing claims to
the trademark. In order to put an end to the infighting, a group of free
software advocates have founded the Association for the Movement Formerly
Known as Open Source (AMFKOS)

One AMFKOS founder said, "I find it ironic that a trademark representing free
software is itself proprietary. This situation must change. We propose that
the free software movement adopt another name besides 'Open Source'.
Hopefully then we can all Get-Back-To-Coding(tm) instead of fighting over
Bruce Perens' and Eric Raymond's egos."

Rumor has it that Richard Stallman plans to mount a campaign to
promote the phrase "GNU/Free Software" in place of "Open Source".
In addition, the terms "Ajar Source", "Unlocked Source", "Nude Source",
"Unclosed Source", and "Just-Type-make Software" have all
been proposed by various Usenet or Slashdot posters.

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #1

Linux-of-the-Month Club
Price: US$60 for a one year membership
Producer: CheapNybbles; 1-800-LINUX-CD

It's the gift that keeps on giving. Every month a CD-ROM with a different
Linux distribution or BSD Unix flavor will be sent in the mail. This is the
perfect gift for those that have been using Slackware since day one and
haven't gotten around to trying another distribution. Or, for those friends
or relatives that still cling to Windows, a Linux-of-the-Month club
membership is the perfect way to say, "Your OS sucks".

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #2

Nerd Trading Cards
Price: $10/pack
Producer: Bottomms; 1-800-NRDS-ROK

Forget baseball, nerd trading cards are the future. Now your kids can
collect and trade cards of their favorite open source hackers and computer
industry figures. Some of the cards included feature Linus Torvalds, Richard
M. Stallman, and Larry Wall. Also contains cards for companies (Red Hat,
Netscape, Transmeta, etc.), specific open source programs (Apache, Perl,
Mozilla, etc.), and well-known websites (Slashdot, Freshmeat, etc.). Each
card features a full-color picture on the front and complete information and
statistics on back. Some of the cards have even been autographed. Quit
trying to search eBay.com for a Mark McGwire rookie card and collect nerd
cards instead!

Based on the Slashdot comments, response to the Apple iMac from the Linux
community was lukewarm at best. Orange Computer, Co., has picked up where
Apple left behind and produced the iTux computer specifically for Linux users
who want to "Think a lot different".

The self-contained iTux computer system is built in the shape of Tux the
Penguin. Its 15 inch monitor (17 inch available next year) is located at
Tux's large belly. The penguin's two feet make up the split ergonomic
keyboard (without those annoying Windows keys, of course). A 36X CD-ROM
drive fits into Tux's mouth. Tux's left eye is actually the reboot button
(can be reconfigured for other purposes since it is rarely used) and his
right eye is the power button. The iTux case opens up from the back,
allowing easy access for screwdriver-wielding nerds into Tux's guts.

The US$995.95 model contains an Alpha CPU and all the usual stuff found in a
Linux-class machine. More expensive models, to be debuted next year, will
feature dual or quad Alpha CPUs and a larger size.

Mix an Internet Explorer CD-ROM, a rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. What
do you have? A whole lot of fun! The Microsoft Destruction Kit is the best
way to destroy those Microsoft CD-ROMs you no longer need now that you've
discovered Linux. You can launch the CD (and registration forms, manuals,
retail boxes, license agreements, etc.) and pepper it with bullets, all while
capturing the event with a digital camera. Or, you can use the included
miniature flamethrower to burn the evil CD to a crisp. The kit comes with a
set of IE 4.0 CDs to get you started. Tell Microsoft "where *you* want
it to go today" in style with the Microsoft Destruction Kit.

The pundits have been hyping new technology allowing your home appliances to
have Internet access. Most people aren't too keen with the thought of their
refrigerator sharing an IP address with their can opener.

But with the new AbsoluteZero(tm) Refrigerator, that might change. This is not
a fridge for your food -- it's a fridge for your overclocked, overheating CPU.
You stick your computer inside, bolt the door shut, turn the temperature down
to 5 degrees Kelvin, and you've got the perfect environment for accelerating
your CPU to 1 Terahertz or more.

This cryogenic cooling system may not actually reach absolute zero, but it
comes mighty close. Unfortunately, the AbsoluteZero(tm) is the size of a small
house, consumes a constant stream of liquid nitrogen, and requires it's own
nuclear reactor (not included). But that's a small price to pay for the
ability to play Quake 3 at 100,000 frames per second.

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #6

Hearing Un-aid
US$129.95 at The Fuzzier Projection Co.

It's a scene we can all identify with: you're at a boring company meeting,
trying to read the latest Slashdot headlines on your PalmPilot, but you can't
concentrate because the PHB is rambling in a loud, booming voice about
e-infomediary-substrategic-paradigms and
meta-content-aggregation-relationship-corridors.

With the Hearing Un-aid(tm), you can put a stop to incessant buzzword-speak by
your boss. Unlike a hearing aid, which amplifies sound, the Hearing Un-aid
dampens noise, so you can easily tune out the board meeting and instead focus
on something far more important, such as downloading Humorix stories.

If you happen to miss something important (yeah, right) and your boss accuses
you of not paying attention, you can simply point to your hearing "aid" and
respond, "What was that? I couldn't hear you because of my temporary hearing
loss."

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #7

Bluescreen Computer Case
US$27.97 at Bud's Beige Box Bazaar

Real Geeks may not admit to using Windows, but there's still countless geeks
out there who must suffer through the humiliation of using Windows while at
work. The patent-not-pending Bluescreen Case, though, will ease the stress of
working with Microsoft "solutions".

This computer case is very similar to other beige boxes, but with one
important difference: the reboot button is covered with a picture of Bill
Gates. When the machine bluescreens for the millionth time, all you have to do
is punch Bill Gates in the face as hard as you can, and the computer will
restart. This provides invaluable therapeutic stress relief.

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #8

Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky
US$29.95 at BobsEcommerceSite.com

Hollywood is full of shady street-side vendors selling "maps to the homes of
the rich and famous" that are actually photocopies of photocopies of
photocopies of an old 1984 Rand McNally map.

But what about the Bay Area? Wouldn't you like to visit the homes and
driveways of the rich and geeky in Silicon Valley? Wouldn't you like to see
Linus Torvalds' residence? Wouldn't you like to drive by the home of
permanent-interim-CEO Steve Jobs? Wouldn't you like to spit on the driveway of
Bill Gates?

Well, now you can. Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky is a full-color
128 page atlas filled with detailed instructions for finding the homes of
1,024 of the world's most famous geeks. From San Jose, to Seattle, to Austin,
to Boston, Bob's Map is your passport to gawk at the homes of the rich and
geeky.

Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #9

Dial-A-Detective
$499.95/year; 1-888-BYE-SPAM

This detective firm is not what you'd expect. Instead of tracking murderers or
unfaithful husbands, this band of rogue private investigators goes after
something just as sinister -- spammers. For a modest annual retainer fee,
these spam detectives will track down the source of every piece of spam you
receive.

Using the latest in forensic technology, they will bring you the virtual scalpof the spammer -- their name, home address, social-security number, and, more
importantly, credit card numbers. At this point you are free to pursue the
evil spammer as you see fit.

If your friend or relative is sick of receiving wave after wave of "Find Out
Anything About Anyone" spams, give them a subscription to Dial-A-Detective,
and they'll find out anything about any spammer -- for real.

Microsoft Open Source Solitaire

REDMOND, WA -- In a first attempt at "embrace-and-extend" of open source
software, Microsoft will release its popular Solitaire and FreeCell games as
open source under the MILA (Microsoft Innovative License Agreement).
According to a Microsoft press release, the Visual C++ source code for the
two games will be available from the Microsoft website "in the first quarter"
(no year was specified).

Industry pundits hail the move as revolutionary. "Microsoft's release of its
most popular Windows feature as open source software demonstrates just how
innovative the company really is. The DoJ is clearly barking up the wrong
tree," wrote one Ziff-Davis flunkie. One executive at a large company said,
"Freely available source code is the best idea Microsoft has ever invented."

One Linux developer told Humorix, "Let's just hope some fool doesn't try to
port this thing to Linux. Imagine the havoc that could ensue if a bunch of
core Linux contributors downloaded Solitaire and became addicted to it. It
would be a disaster! Linux and open source development would grind to a halt
while the hackers wasted their time playing Solitaire or FreeCell. 'Just one
more game...' they would say."

Linux Advocacy Crackdown

SHERIDAN, WY -- In an unprecedented blow to Linux advocacy, Aaron McAdams, an
employee at the Sheridan Try-N-Save Discount Store, was fired last week.
According to the store's general manager, McAdams was fired because "he
constantly rearranged items on shelves so that Linux-related books and
software boxes would be displayed more prominently than Windows merchandise."
McAdams' boss added, "If he would have spent as much time actually working as
he did hiding Windows books at the back of shelves, he wouldn't have received
the pink slip."

The general manager supplied Humorix with videotapes from the store's
security cameras showing McAdams in action. In one scene, he takes a whole
stack of "...For Dummies" books and buries them in the Cheap Romance section,
an area of the store rarely visited by computer users. In another, McAdams
can be plainly seen setting copies of Red Hat Linux in front of a large,
eye-catching display of various Microsoft products at the front of the
store. Finally, at one point McAdams can be seen slapping huge tags reading
"DEMO DISPLAY BOX -- NOT AVAILABLE UNTIL 1999" on boxes of Windows 98.

McAdams disputes his bosses accusations. "If he would spend more time
actually working instead of peering over security camera footage for hours on
end, this store might actually turn a profit for a change."

Red Hat Linux 10.0

RALEIGH-DURHAM, NC -- HypeNewsWire -- Red Hat, the producer of the most
popular Linux distribution with over 25 million estimated users, is proud to
announce the availability of Red Hat Linux 10.0. The latest version
contains the new Linux 6.2 kernel, the Z Window System 2.0, full support for
legacy Windows 3.x/9x/200x/NT software apps, and more. Copies of Red Hat
Linux 10.0 will be available in stores on CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or GNUDE (GNU
Digital Encoding) disks within the next week.

Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and several other large computer manufacturers have
announced that they will offer computer systems with Red Hat 10.0
pre-installed. "We can sell systems with Red Hat pre-installed for
considerably less than systems with Microsoft ActiveWindows 2001. Overall,
Red Hat Linux's superior quality, low price, and modest system requirements
puts Windows to shame," one Dell spokesperson said at last week's LinDex
convention.

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Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "Frequent Upgrade Points"

Microsoft's PR masterminds are planning a massive marketing campaign,
code-named "ActivePromo 2000", to promote the upcoming release of Windows
2000 (scheduled for February 2001). This marketing campaign will include a
"Frequent Upgrade Points" promotion.

Customers who purchase upgrades to Windows, Office, or other Microsoft
"solutions" will receive "frequent upgrade points" (FUPs) when they register
online. These points, like Frequent Flyer Miles, can be redeemed in the
future for discounts on other Microsoft upgrades. This program, combined
with the fact that older versions of some Microsoft programs have glaring
Y2K problems, should be enough to convince many people to shell out big
bucks to upgrade to a more bloated Microsoft operating system. The company
hopes to eradicate 99% of Windows 3.x installations by 2003.

Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "Match Vaporware & Win!"

Microsoft's PR masterminds are planning a massive marketing campaign,
code-named "ActivePromo 2000", to promote the upcoming release of Windows
2000 (scheduled for February 2001). This marketing campaign will include a
"Match Vaporware & Win!" promotion.

Microsoft will team up with a major fast-food chain (McDonalds, probably,
since it has the largest market share, but Burger King is another
possibility) for a special Windows 2000 promotion. With every combo meal
purchase, the customer will receive a game token containing a date on it. If
the official release of Windows 2000 is on that date, the customer can
redeem the token for a variety of prizes -- ranging from a "lifetime supply"of Windows upgrades, to 25,000 shares of Microsoft stock.

Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "What Slogan Do You Want to See Tommorrow?"

Microsoft's PR masterminds are planning a massive marketing campaign,
code-named "ActivePromo 2000", to promote the upcoming release of Windows
2000 (scheduled for February 2001). This marketing campaign will include a
"What Slogan Do You Want to See Tommorrow?" promotion.

Children under age 16 will have to opportunity to create their own Microsoft
slogan to replace the aging "Where Do You Want to Go Today?"(R) motto.
Microsoft will set up a special email alias where children can submit their
entries along with detailed personal and demographic information (for
verification purposes, of course). A panel of Microsoft employees will
select a winning entry, which will become the official slogan. The winner
and his/her family will receive an all-expense paid week-long vacation to
Redmond, WA ("The Vacation Capital of East Central Washington State"),
including a guided tour of the Microsoft campus and a personal ten minute
photo-opportunity with Chairman Bill.

We personally believe that "Don't Think About Going Anywhere Else Today"
would make a perfect Microsoft slogan. "Crashes Are Normal" might also be a
good choice.

Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "Windows Competitive Upgrade Offer"

Microsoft's PR masterminds are planning a massive marketing campaign,
code-named "ActivePromo 2000", to promote the upcoming release of Windows
2000 (scheduled for February 2001). This marketing campaign will include a
"Windows Competitive Upgrade Offer" promotion.

Users of non-Microsoft operating systems (Linux in particular) will be given
the opportunity to trade-in their present OS for a free copy of Windows 98
(or NT 4.0) and Office 97. People (all three of them) who want to
participate in this program will have to:

1. Mail their operating system's floppy disks or CD-ROMs to Microsoft

2. Agree to a two year contract with the Microsoft Network.

3. Agree (in writing) to the Competitive Upgrade License Agreement; one of
the terms of which is that the user may not install, copy, or otherwise use
a non-Microsoft OS for five years.

Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "State Innovation Day"

Microsoft has successfully lobbied for the State of Washington to declare
August 24th as State Innovation Day. Efforts are underway to lobby the US
Congress to decree a similar designation nationally. Several events are
scheduled on August 24, 1999 to showcase "innovation" in the computer
industry (in other words, Microsoft), including:

* An "Innovation is Cool" essay contest for high school and
college students. Possible topics include "Why IE Should Be Integrated in
Windows", "Why Bill Gates Is My Hero", "Government Intervention is Evil",
and "Why Monopolies Improve Product Quality and Lower Prices".

* A 24-hour "Innovation in Education" telethon on NBC to raise money for
school districts nationwide to buy new Wintel computer systems and Internet
access through the Microsoft Network.

Is Windows Antique?

SILICON VALLEY -- The first ever antique mall devoted to computers has
opened its doors deep in the heart of Silicon Valley. Named "Stacksof Antiqueues", the new mall features obsolete hardware, old software,
and other curiosities that only a nerd would want to buy. The mall
also features a whole collection of Microsoft software, which, as can
be expected, has the Redmond giant up in arms.

The mall, founded by a group of Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS users, has a whole
section devoted to Microsoft "antiques". Offerings range from a rare
(and expensive) copy of Windows 1.0 all the way up to Windows 98. All
versions of DOS from 1.0 up are available, in addition to such Microsoft
products as Bob, Profit, and Multiplan.

Bob Hinesdorf, one of the mall's founders, defends the decision to
include Microsoft products in its selection of antique computer stuff.
"Windows 98 is surely antique; it's based on 16 bit Windows 3.x code,
which was based on 16 bit DOS code, which was based loosely on 8 bit
CP/M."

Open Source Irrational Constant

BREEZEWOOD, PA -- In a revelation that could rock the foundations of
science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the
irrational constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't
believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am
staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0.
Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..."

Hoffman explained, "My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and
manipulations to each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters
that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel."

Many members of the scientific community are skeptical. One One
mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said,
"This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as
the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a Linux fortune(6) file. Hoffman's
'discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research
grants."

In a related matter, we have received an unconfirmed report that a region of
the Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS
WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT
HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.

Attack of the Tuxissa Virus

What started out as a prank posting to comp.os.linux.advocacy yesterday has
turned into one of the most significant viruses in computing history.
The creator of the virus, who goes by the moniker "Anonymous Longhair",
modified the Melissa virus to install Linux on infected machines.

"It's a work of art," one Linux advocate told Humorix after he looked
through the Tuxissa virus source code. "This virus goes well beyond the
feeble troublemaking of Melissa. It actually configures a UMSDOS partition
on the user's hard drive and then downloads and installs a stripped-down
version of Slackware Linux."

The email message that the virus is attached to has the subject "Important
Message About Windows Security". The text of the body says, "I want to let
you know about some security problems I've uncovered in Windows 95/98/NT,
Office 95/97, and Outlook. It's critically important that you protect your
system against these attacks. Visit these sites for more information..."
The rest of the message contains 42 links to sites about Linux and free
software.

Details on how the virus started are a bit sketchy. The "Anonymous
Longhair" who created it only posted it to Usenet as an early April Fool's
gag, demonstrating how easy it would be to mount a "Linux revolution".

New Crime Identified: "Tech Rage"

HARRISBURG, IL -- The police department in this Illinois town has coined a
new term for a growing trend in crime: "tech rage". Tech rage shares many
similarities with another modern crime, "road rage", but instead of
affecting drivers, tech rage is experienced by disgruntled computer users.

The first documented case of tech rage involves a Microsoft salesman, Bob
Glutzfield, who convinced the local TV station to "upgrade" its computer
systems from Macintosh to Wintel. While the migration seemed successful at
first, the Blue Screen became more prevalent during the following months.

Then, in January, the entire computer system crashed in the middle of the
weather forecast during the 10 o'clock evening news. Viewers could plainly
see the Blue Screen of Death showing in the monitors behind James Roland,
the chief meteorologist. The instability of Windows 98 stretched Roland's
patience until he snapped last week and succumbed to tech rage.

Roland tracked down the Microsoft salesman and followed him one evening to
his apartment. The weatherman yelled at the bewildered Microserf, "You
[expletive]! Because of you, I'm the [expletive] laughing stock of Southern
Illinois!" and then proceeded to beat him up. Roland is currently out on
bond pending trial next month.

Invasion of the Dancing Penguin

Those annoying, dancing cartoon characters embedded in software applications
are no longer confined to Microsoft programs. They have entered the realmof Linux. A new Linux distribution under development, called LinTux,
promises to provide a more "user-friendly" environment through its "Dancing
Penguin" assistant.

Dancing Tux will "guide" users through the installation process and will be
a permanent fixture of the X root window. The LinTux staff demonstrated a
prototype version of the Dancing Tux program to this Humorix reporter. It
was certainly impressive, but, like the Dancing Paper Clip in Microsoft
Office, it becomes annoying very fast.

The one redeeming feature of LinTux is that, when the system is idle,
Dancing Tux becomes a make-shift screen saver. The animations included in
the prototype were quite amusing. For instance, in one scene, Tux chases
Bill Gates through an Antarctic backdrop. In another animation, Tux can be
seen drinking beers with his penguin pals and telling Microsoft jokes.

The War Against Linux

A significant obstacle on the path to Linux World Domination has emerged. A
reactionary grass-roots movement has formed to fight, as they call it, "The
War Against Linux". This movement, code-named "LinSux", is composed of
people (mostly Microsoft stockholders and commercial software developers)
who want to maintain the status quo. They are fighting back against the
rise of Linux and free software which they see as a threat to their financial
independence.

The most damaging attack the LinSux folks have launched is "Three Mile
Island", a Windows macro virus designed to inflict damage on computers that
contain a partition devoted to a non-Microsoft OS. When the victim computer
is booted into Windows, the virus activates and deletes any non-Microsoft
partitions. Ironically, the many security flaws in Windows allow the virus
to damage alternative operating systems but leave Windows unscathed.

"The War Against Linux" has also been fought in more subtle ways.
Time-tested methods of Linux advocacy have been turned into subtle forms of
anti-Linux advocacy by the LinSux crowd. MSCEs are smuggling NT boxes into
companies that predominantly use Linux or Unix. LinSux "freedom fighters"
are rearranging books and software boxes on store shelves so that Microsoft
offerings are displayed more prominently.

BSOD Simulator

Users of Red Hat 6.0 are discovering a new feature that hasn't been widely
advertised: a Blue Screen of Death simulator. By default, the bsodsim
program activates when the user hits the virtually unused SysRq key (this is
customizable) causing the system to switch to a character cell console to
display a ficticious Blue Screen.

Red Hat hails the bsodsim program as the "boss key" for the Linux world. One
RH engineer said, "Workers are smuggling Linux boxes into companies that
exclusively use Windows. This is all good and well until the PHB walks by
and comments, 'That doesn't look like Windows...' With bsodsim, that problem
is solved. The worker can hit the emergency SysRq key, and the system will
behave just like Windows..."

The bsodsim program doesn't stop at just showing a simulated error message.
If the boss doesn't walk away, the worker can continue the illusion by
hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL, which causes a simulated reboot. After showing the
usual boot messages, bsodsim will run a simulated SCANDISK program
indefinitely. The boss won't be able to tell the difference. If the boss
continues to hang around, the worker can say, "SCANDISK is really taking a
long time... maybe we should upgrade our computers. And don't you have
something better to do than watch this computer reboot for the tenth time
today?"

Actual Snippet of Windows Source Code! Honest!

NOTE: The following snippet of the Windows 95 source code was sent to us via
'unofficial' channels. Don't tell anyone you saw this! We really don't
feel like being visited by the Microsoft Intellectual Property Police.

Examples of the output generated when running commonly typed commands
under YODIX, the new Unix-like operating system for Star Wars fans
(Submitted by Dave Finton):

# pwd
Know you not where you are. Show you I shall.

# uptime
When 900 years you be, look this good you will not.

# cd /win95
Once you start down the Dark Path, forever will it dominate your destiny!

# winnuke 192.168.1.0
That, my friend, will lead you to the dark side. Help you I will not.

# rm -rf /
Idiot you are. Yeeesss.

# shutdown -h now
Luke... there is... another... Sky... walker...

Dave Finton gazes into his crystal ball...

July 2000: Government Issues Update on Y2K Crisis to American Public

In a statement to all U.S. citizens, the President assured that the
repairs to the nation's infrastructure, damaged severely when the Y2K
crisis hit on January 1, is proceeding on track with the Government's
guidelines. The message was mailed to every citizen by mail carriers via
horseback. The statement itself was written on parchment with hand-made
ink written from fountain pens.

"Our technological progress since the Y2K disaster has been staggering,"
said the statement. "We have been able to fix our non-Y2K compliant horse
carriages so that commerce can once again continue. We believe that we
will be able to reinvent steam-powered engines within the next decade.
Internal combustion engines should become operational once again sometime
before the dawn of the next century."

No one knows when the technological luxuries we once enjoyed as little as
6 months ago will return. Things such as e-mail, the Internet, and all
computers were lost when the crisis showed itself for what it really was:
a disaster waiting to happen. Scholars predict the mainframe computer will
be invented again during the 24th century...

Dave Finton gazes into his crystal ball...

January 2099: Rob Malda Finally Gets His Damned Nano-Technology

The Linux hacker community finally breathed a collective sigh of relief
when it was announced that Rob Malda finally got his damned
nanotechnology.

"It's about time!" exclaimed one Dothead. "He been going on about that
crap since god-knows-when. Now that he's got that and those wearable
computers, maybe we can read about something interesting on Slashdot!"

Observers were skeptical, however. Already the now-immortal Rob Malda
nano-cyborg (who reportedly changed his name to "18 of 49, tertiary
adjunct of something-or-other") has picked up a few new causes to shout
about to the high heavens until everyone's ears start bleeding. In one
Slashdot article, Malda writes "Here's an article about the potential of
large greyish high-tech mile-wide cubes flying through space, all
controlled by a collective mind set upon intergalactic conquest.
Personally, I can't wait. Yum."

When Computers Crash

HOLLYWOOD -- The FOX TV Network has announced a new series of "reality
shows" to be aired over the summer. The series, "When Computers Crash",
will consist of five hour-long shows documenting the aftermath of serious
computer crashes, failures, and other problems. This show comes on the
heels of other FOX reality shows such as "World's Funniest Antitrust Trial
Bloopers", "When Stupid TV Network Executives Create Bad Show Ideas", and
"When Lame Fortune Files Poke Fun At FOX Reality Shows"...

To coincide with the series, FOX will sponsor a publicity gimmick called
"Crash & Win!" Contest participants will download a free Windows 9x/NT
program that keeps track of the number of Blue Screens, Illegal
Operations, or other fatal errors that force a reboot. When a crash
occurs, the program will log it in an encrypted database, which will be
periodically uploaded to the "FOX Crash & Win!" server.

Prizes such as a "Deciphering Windows Error Messages for Dummies" book, a
1999 Ford "Gasguzzler" Sport Utility Vehicle, or a lifetime supply of
stress relief medication will be awarded to participants based on the
number of crashes they log.

The GPL Is Not Y2K-Compliant!

BOSTON, MA -- Panic ensued earlier today at GNU Project Headquarters when
it was discovered that the GNU General Public License is not ready for the
year 2000. Thankfully, the panic quickly subsided when RMS posted an
emergency diff file to Usenet that patches the GPL to eliminate the
problem.

The non-Y2K compliant material appears on lines 295 and 316 of version 2.0of the GPL. Both lines contain the text, "Copyright (C) 19yy ", a classic
example of unpreparedness for the year 2000.

Microsoft was quick to respond to the news, saying in a rushed press
release, "At least our license agreements don't contain any Y2K issues."
The GNU Project immediately countered Microsoft's statement with a press
release that said simply, "Whatever".

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#1)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 1: What is your opinion of the Microsoft antitrust trial?

A. The DoJ is wasting taxpayer's money. Now, if the DOJ were to upgrade
all of its computer systems to Windows, then the department would be
making wise use of tax dollars.

B. All of the Microsoft email messages that the evil government has
presented as evidence are obviously taken out of context or have been
completely twisted around. I mean... Bill Gates would never say "let's
cut off their air supply" in a memo; it's an obvious fabrication.

C. Judge Jackson is obviously biased in favor of the DOJ's vigilante
persecution of Microsoft.

D. If Microsoft loses, it will be the gravest miscarriage of justice in
all the history of mankind.

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#3)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 3: Have you ever experimented with the freeware Linux OS created
by a group of anarchist acne-laden teenagers via the Net?

A. No, I'd never trust my work to a piece of non-Microsoft software.

B. No, I'd never trust my computer to a piece of software that has a
restrictive license agreement such as the GNU GPL.

C. No, I don't want to mess with the ancient command line interface Linux
imposes on its users.

D. Yes, but I quickly migrated back to modern Windows NT after I had
trouble figuring out how to boot the thing from the cryptic LILO
prompt.

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#5)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 5: Where do you want to go today?(tm)

A. To Washington, D.C. to meet Janet Reno and cuss her out for persecuting
Microsoft

B. To Redmond, WA to take a tour of the Microsoft campus

C. To the software store to purchase a new piece of Microsoft software

D. To my local school district to convince the administration to upgrade
the Macintoshes in the computer labs to Wintel systems

E. I don't know about myself, but I'd like to see so-called "consumer
advocates" like Ralph Nader go to Hell.

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#7)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 7: What new features would you like to see in Windows 2000?

A. A marquee on the taskbar that automatically scrolls the latest
headlines from MSNBC and Microsoft Press Pass

B. Content filtration software for Internet Explorer that will prevent my
children from accessing dangerous propaganda about Linux.

C. A new card game; I've spent over 10,000 hours playing Solitaire during
my free time at work and I'm starting to get bored with it

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 9: Which of the following do you prefer as a replacement for the
current Microsoft slogan?

A. "Over 20 Years of Innovation"
B. "Wintel Inside"
C. "Your Windows And Gates To The World"
D. "Because Anti-Trust Laws Are Obsolete"
E. "One Microsoft Way. It's Much More Than An Address!"
F. "This Motto Is Not Anti-Competitive. And Neither Is Microsoft."
G. "Fighting the Department of Injustice Since Day One"

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#13)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 13: Which of the following new Microsoft products do you plan on
buying within the next 6 months?

A. Windows For Babies(tm) - Using an enhanced "click-n-drool" interface,
babies will be able to learn how to use a Wintel computer, giving them
a head start in living in a Microsoft-led world.

B. Where In Redmond Is Carmen Sandiego?(tm) - The archvillian Sandiego has
stolen the Windows source code and must be stopped before she can
publish it on the Net.

D. Visual BatchFile(tm) - An IDE and compiler for the MS-DOS batch file
language. MSNBC calls it "better than Perl".

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#14)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 14: How would you rate the performance of the Microsoft defense
team in the antitrust trial?

A. Perfect; they have clearly shown that Microsoft's market leading
position is good for consumers.

B. Outstanding; all of the pundits who are predicting that Microsoft will
lose are a bunch of idiots.

C. Excellent; Bill Gates' wonderful video deposition clearly demonstrated
to the American public that he is a true visionary.

D. I don't know; I haven't been paying any attention to the case because I
know Microsoft will prevail anyways.

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#15)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 15: In your opinion, what companies should Microsoft seek to
acquire in the coming year?

A. Disney. I'd like to see a cute animated movie starring Clippit the
Office Assistant.

B. CBS. I'd like to see a new line-up featuring must-watch shows like
"Touched by a Microserf", "Redmond Hope", "Everybody Loves Bill", "The
Late Show With Steve Ballmer", and "60 Minutes... of Microsoft
Infomercials",

C. Google. Microsoft could drastically improve the quality and performanceof this search engine by migrating it from Linux to Windows NT
servers.

D. Lowes Hardware Stores. Every copy of Windows 2000 could come bundled
with a coupon for a free kitchen sink or a free window!

Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#18)

Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill
out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade.

Question 18: Witnessing the popularity of "Dilbert", Microsoft has plans
to launch a syndicated comic strip featuring life at Microsoft. What
characters would you like to see in such a comic strip?

B. Bob, a wacky Microsoft programmer who likes to insert easter eggs in
his work, and who is addicted to playing "Age of Empires"

C. Bill Gates, the intelligent nerd extraordinaire who always gets his way
by simply giving people large sums of money

D. Ed Muth, the Microsoft spokesman who keeps putting his foot in his
mouth. When not in public, he's a surprisingly sexy "chic magnet"

E. Poorard Stalinman, the leader of a movement of hackers to provide
"free" software for the masses at the expense of Capitalistic values

Slashdot Effect Vaporizes Ganymede
-- Submitted by Dave Finton

In one of the more bizarre consequences of the infamous "Slashdot Effect",
Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system, was completely and utterly
destroyed when CmdrTaco posted an article about the Hubble Space
Telescope's latest round of images and discoveries.

"It all started when we put up some more info on our web page about
Jupiter and Ganymede," said one NASA guy whom we believe may be in chargeof something. "CmdrTaco got wind of it, and posted it on his site."

According to observers, the webserver promptly exploded thereafter,
damaging the nearby remote control system used to aim and focus the
Hubble's cameras from the ground.

"All of the sudden our controls went wacky!" said one engineer. "The
Hubble then started shooting these death rays all over the universe. Oneof those rays hit Ganymede, and *POOF*. There it went! We were all like,
'COOOOOL! Let's aim it something else!'"

Top Ten Differences If Thomas Jefferson Behaved Like Eric Raymond During
the American Revolution

2. The preamble to the Constitution would say, "We the pragmatists of the
Open States of America, in order to foster the production of higher
quality tea and tobacco..."

5. The phrases "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" and "Geeks
With Guns" would be plastered throughout the O.S.A. Constitution.

9. Instead of Congress, the "Open States Institute" board of directors
would make all of the national legislative decisions.

10. Raymond, New Hampshire would be the home of the O.S.A. capitol.

Boston Software Party

BOSTON, MA -- Thousands of disgruntled Linux revolutionaries showed up at
the Boston Harbor today to protest "taxation without representation" by
the oppressive Microsoft Corporation. Thousands of pounds of Microsoft
boxes, CD-ROMs, manuals, license agreements, promotional materials, and
registration forms were dumped into the harbor during the First Annual
Boston Software Party.

Some attendees sold hastily printed T-shirts with slogans like "July 4th,
1999: Microsoft Independence Day!" and "What do you call 10,000 pounds of
Microsoft software at the bottom of the ocean? A darned good start!"
Others sold fake dollar bills with a portrait of Tux Penguin and the
saying, "In Linus We Trust"...

Jargon Coiner (#1)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

Example: "Eric wincursed when his mother showed him the new computer she
bought from CompUSSR... which contained a WinModem and a WinSoundCard."

* WIND'OH KEY: Nickname given to the three useless Windows keys that come
on virtually all new keyboards. These keys are often hit by mistake
instead of CTRL or ALT, causing the user to shout "D'oh!"

* DE-WIND'OH!ED KEYBOARD: (1) A new keyboard produced without any wind'oh!
keys or a "Enhanced for Windows 95/98" logo. Extremely rare. (2) A
keyboard in which the wind'oh! keys have been physically removed.

Jargon Coiner (#2)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* SLASHDUP EFFECT, THE: Accidentally posting two or more duplicate
comments to Slashdot, usually as the result of hitting ENTER at the
wrong time or fumbling with the Preview option.

* YOU'VE GOT SLOGAN: The tendency for reporters to parody the stupid
"You've Got Mail" saying when writing about AOL.

Example: "You've Got Spam", "You've Got Merger" (the headline for an
article about the Netscape/AOL Merger From Hell)

* PENGUINIZATION: Ongoing trend to slap a picture of Tux Penguin next to
anything even remotely related to Linux.

* IDLESURF: Aimless surfing of the Internet; looking for something
interesting to read while killing time. Often involves reloaded the
Slashdot homepage every 5 minutes to see if a new article has been
posted.

Jargon Coiner (#3)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

Example: "John had some lilosplainin' to do after his boss turned on the
computer and the Windows splash screen didn't appear."

* UPTIME DOWNER: Depression that strikes a Linux sysadmin after his uptime
is ruined. Can be caused by an extended power outtage, a pet chewing
through the power cord, a lightning bolt striking the power line, or an
urgent need to reboot into Windows to read a stupid Word document.

* OSTR (Off-Switch Total Recall): The sudden recollection of something
terribly important you need to do online that occurs exactly 0.157
seconds after you've shut down your computer.

Jargon Coiner (#4)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* FREE LECTURE: Attempting to explain the concepts of Linux, Open Source
software, free software, and gift cultures to someone who is not
familiar with them. Made extra difficult if the explainee has been
misled by superficial mainstream news articles about the subject.

Example: "Eric gave an hour-long free lecture to his mother-in-law after
she asked him about this Linux thingy she read about in USA Today."

* LEXICON LAZINESS: Filling a fortune file with a list of fake jargon
instead of publishing something more substantive (and funny) that would
take more effort to write.

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* HOBTOB (Hanging Out By The O'Reilly Books): Seeking free Linux technical
support at a bookstore by waiting near the computer books for a geek to
come by and then casually asking them for help.

* MOOLA (Marketing Officially Organizes Linux Adoptance): A press release
issued by a Dot Com (or Dot Con?) heralding their "support" for Linux
(i.e. "BigPortal.com adopts Linux as their official operating system by
adding five Linux-related links to their BigDirectory"); used to inflate
their stock price and rake in moola even though none of their employees
have ever used Linux and don't really care.

* KARMA KOLLECTOR: Slashdot user who treats the acquisition of "karma" as
a game; often has a detailed strategy on how to sucker moderators into
raising the score of their posts (i.e. posting a comment with a title
like "Microsoft Sucks!!! (Score 3, Insightful)" or using "Only a fool
would moderate this down" as a signature). See also "Karma Whore".

Jargon Coiner (#12)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* IPO (I've Patented the Obvious): Acquiring patents on trivial things and
then hitting other companies over the head with them.

Example: "Amazon just IPO'd one-click spam and is now ready to sue B&N."

* IPO (I'm Pissed Off): Exclamation given by a Linux user who was unable
to participate in a highly lucrative Linux IPO due to lack of capital or
E*Trade problems. Also uttered by Linux hackers who did not receive The
Letter from Red Hat or VA Linux even though their friends did.

Examples: "Don't blame us, our website was offline after we suffered a
YAKBA". "Don't worry about Y2K, what we need to think about is
YAKBA-compliance."

Jargon Coiner (#13)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* NINETY-NINERS: In 1849, a horde of people ("Forty-niners") headed to
California to pan gold and get rich quick. In 1999, a horde of people
("Ninety-niners") headed to California to invest in Linux companies and
get rich quick. Some things never change.

* ZOO: The ubiquitous shelf of O'Reilly Animal Books that many nerds keep
next to their computer

* THEY'RE MULTIPLYING LIKE PORTALS: The proliferation of Linux portals
that have the latest headlines from Slashdot and LinuxToday but offer
little original content.

* YOU CAN SPELL EVIL WITHOUT vi: A curse uttered by freshman Computer
Science students struggling with vi's insert mode for the first time.

Treaty of Helsinki Signed

HELSINKI, FINLAND -- A cease-fire in the flame war between Linux and
FreeBSD has been reached. A group of two dozen Linux and FreeBSD zealots
met in Helsinki to ratify a treaty bringing a temporary end to the hostile
fighting between both camps. "Today is a good day for peace," one observer
noted. "Now both sides can lay down their keyboards and quit flaming the
opposing side on Usenet and Slashdot."

The cease-fire is a response to the sudden increase in fighting that has
occured over the past two weeks. The Slashdot server became a victim of
the cross-fire this week when thousands of Anonymous Cowards and Geek
Zealots posted inflammatory comments that amounted to, "My OS is better
than your OS!" Many nerds, suffering withdrawl symptoms when the Slashdot
site slowed to a crawl, demanded that the bickering stop.

"I can't take it anymore! It takes two minutes to download the Slashdot
homepage -- assuming the site is actually online. I must have my 'News for
Nerds' now! The fighting must stop," one Anonymous Coward ranted.

ERIC S. RAYMOND: I'd like to introduce Eric Jones, a disadvantaged memberof the geek community who has been forced to live in a homeless shelter.
Eric? Come on out here and tell us about yourself...

JONES: Well, I'm a consultant for a Bay Area corporation. Due to the
housing crisis, I've been forced to sleep in a shelter.

ESR: How much do you make?

JONES: Over $100,000 a year.

ESR: Wow! And you still can't afford housing or rent? That sounds
terrible... Hopefully with this telethon we'll be able to raise money to
fund new shelters for disadvantaged geeks like Eric here. We also have
plans for a Silicon Valley Terraforming Initiative in which several square
miles of Pacific Ocean will be turned into usuable land for building
housing and apartments for geeks...

-- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon

This telethon isn't just about helping disenfranchised geeks. We're
also here for the betterment of mankind through our research into finding
a Cure for Windows.

Each day, millions of man-hours are wasted due to design flaws in
Microsoft Windows. Each day, millions of dollars are sent by business and
individuals like yourself into a huge black hole known as "Microsoft" for
exorbitantly priced software products that should be free.

But don't worry. We've almost found a Cure for Windows. Geeks worldwide
have toiled endlessly for the past eight years working on a replacement
operating system called Linux. It's almost ready. Now we need to convince
the world to use our creation and eliminate the virus known as Windows.

Programming for money sucks... you have to deal with PHBs, 16 hour days,
and spending the night in your cubicle half of the time to avoid the
Commute From Hell...

I minored in Journalism, so I tried to switch into a job as an IT pundit.
You'd think they'd welcome a geek like me with open arms, but they
didn't. Ziff-Davis wouldn't even give me an interview. I was "too
qualified" they said. Apparently my technical acumen was too much for
their organization, which employs Jesse Berst and the ilk.

It gets worse. I tried to get an entry-level reporting job for a
local-yokel paper. After the interview they gave me a "skills test": I had
to compose an article using Microsoft Word 97. Since I've never touched a
Windows box, I had no clue how to use it. When I botched the test, the
personnel manager spouted, "Your resume said you were a computer
programmer. Obviously you're a liar. Get out of my office now!"

-- Excerpt from a horror story about geek discrimination during
the Geek Grok '99 telethon

OPPRESSED GEEK: Everybody keeps blaming me for the Y2K problem, the
Melissa Virus, Windows crashes... you name it. When somebody finds out
you're a bona fide geek, they start bugging you about computer problems. I
frequently hear things like, "Why can't you geeks make Windows work
right?", "What kind of idiot writes a program that can't handle the year
2000?", "Geeks are evil, all they do is write viruses", and "The Internet
is the spawn of Satan".

I'm afraid to admit I have extensive computing experience. When somebody
asks what kind of job I have, I always lie. From my experience, admitting
that you're a geek is an invitation to disaster.

LARRY WALL: I know, I know. I sometimes say that I'm the founder of a
pearl harvesting company instead of admitting that I'm the founder of the
Perl programming language.

ERIC S. RAYMOND: This is tragic. We can't live in a world like this. We
need your donations to fight social oppression and ignorance against
geekdom...

-- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon

Do-It-Yourself IPO

You too can get rich quick by translating an existing Linux
distribution into one of the following untapped markets:

- Babylonian
- Hittite
- Ancient Egyptian (hieroglyphics may be a challenge, though)
- Pig Latin (this may be the strongest type of encryption allowed by the
DOJ in the near future)
- Mayan
- Cherokee
- Cyrillic (to take advantage of the booming Russian economy)
- Redneck
- Klingon (it's a wonder this hasn't been done yet)
- Wingdings

Once you start marketing your new product, a highly lucrative
self-underwritten IPO is just months away!

Bill Gates Passes Turing Test

LONDON, ENGLAND -- Microsoft proclaimed that they have passed the Turing
Test by creating a Bill Gates multimedia simulacrum that crack BBC
interviewer Jeremy Paxman couldn't distinguish from the real thing. "I
never would have expected this," Paxman said about the Gates AI program.
"After all, this Microsoft program actually worked for an extended periodof time, something you don't see very often."

Microsoft has plans to mass-produce the Bill Gates holographic simulation
by 2010 or so. "The hardware just isn't there yet for home use," a
Microserf explained. "By then, though, Intel's Itanium 6 Super Pro Plus
III CPU running at 600 Ghz or whatever should be sufficient." Windows 2010
is expected to include the Bill Gates simulation, making the World's
Richest Man(tm) accessible to the entire world.

A newly printed brochure for the faux-Gates advertises, "Need help running
Windows 2010? Bill Gates will sit beside you and guide you through the
system. Have a question for the world's sexiest and smartest nerd? He'll
answer it. Wondering if free and open source software is a plot by
Communists freaks to overthrow the free market system? He'll be there to
explain. Want to ask for a personal loan? Sorry, won't happen."

This is excellent news! I haven't thought about remedies yet... well, you
know, I can think of one thing the court should do: require that Microsoft
remove the Dancing Paper Clip and associated crap from Office... Oh, and
while they're at it, get rid of those multi-megabyte easter eggs. Why does
Excel need a flight simulator? So I can see the Blue Screen of Death in
3D? Oh, and another thing, the court needs to put a hex on ActiveX...

Don't you see? This whole trial is a conspiracy concocted by Bill Gates.
He knows that he stands to make even more billions if Microsoft is broken
up into Baby Bills... just like Rockefeller did with Standard Oil, and
stockholders did with Ma Bell. Bill Gates actually wants the DOJ to win.
That's why he's been so arrogant in court; he wants Judge Jackson to throw
the book at him! It will be a very lucrative book. The faked Windows
video? His amnesia during the video deposition? It's all a ruse to fool
Microsoft stockholders... and us.

-- The ramblings of a resident Slashdot conspiracy nut in response
to Judge Jackson's harsh Findings Of Fact against Microsoft

Don't get too ecstatic, we all know what's going to
happen next. This so-called trial is rigged, just like wrestling and
boxing. Microsoft is the Don King of the software industry... they control
who wins. I've been told that if you call Microsoft's legal department
hotline, you get a recorded messages that says, "For the verdicts of past
Microsoft court cases, press 1. For the verdicts of future Microsoft court
cases, press 2..."

0. Microserf - Your life revolves around Windows and you worship Bill
Gates and his innovative company.
1. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt... About Microsoft - You encounter a growing
number of problems with Microsoft solutions, shaking your world-view
2. FUD... About Linux - After hearing about this new Linux thing, you
take the plunge, but are unimpressed by the nerdware OS.
3. Born-Again Microserf - You rededicate your life to Microsoft worship
4. Disgruntled User - Microsoft software keeps screwing you over,
and you're not going to take it anymore!
5. A Religious Experience - You successfully install Linux, and are
left breathless at its elegance. No more Windows for you!
6. Linux Convert - You continue to fall in love with the new system
7. Linux Zealot - You dedicate your life to Linux World Domination...
and it shows! You go beyond mere advocacy to sheer zealotry.
8. Back To Reality - Forces out of your control compel you to
return to using Windows and Office
9. Enlightened Linux User - You become 100% Microsoft free after finding
ways to overcome the need for Microsoft bloatware
10.Get A Life - You become a millionaire after your Linux portal is
acquired; you move to a small tropical island and get a life

The Latest Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: Bashing Linux

As used by Jesse Berst and Fred Moody...

1. Write a scathing article attacking some facet of Linux and publish it
2. Arrange for the article to be mentioned on LinuxToday or Slashdot.
3. Watch as thousands of angry Linux zealots storm your article and load
the advertising banners. Listen to the ca-chink $ound of the
advertising revenue that's pouring in.
4. As soon as the maelstrom quiets, publish another scathing article about
the immaturity of the Linux "community", excerpting some of the nasty
flames from Linux longhairs denouncing your intelligence and claiming
that you're on the Microsoft payroll.
5. Arrange for the article to be mentioned on LinuxToday or Slashdot.
6. Watch as thousands of angry Linux zealots storm your article...
7. Wait for a few weeks, and repeat. Cash your inflated paycheck, invest
the proceeds in some Linux stocks, and retire early. You've "earned" it!

What Did Santa Claus Bring You In 1999? (#1)

LINUS TORVALDS: Santa didn't bring me anything, but Tim O'Reilly just gave
me a large sum of money to publish my new book, "Linus Torvalds' Official
Guide To Receiving Fame, Fortune, and Hot Babes By Producing Your Own
Unix-Like Operating System In Only 10 Years".

ORDINARY LINUX HACKER: I kept hinting to my friends and family that I
wanted to build my own Beowulf Cluster. My grandmother got mixed up and
gave me a copy of "Beowulf's Chocolate Cluster Cookbook". I like
chocolate, but I would've preferred silicon.

LINUX LONGHAIR: My friends sent me a two-year subscription to several
Ziff-Davis publications, much to my dislike. I don't want to read Jesse
Berst's rants against Linux, or John Dvorak's spiels about how great
Windows 2000 is. Still, I suppose this isn't so bad. Ziff-Davis glossy
paper makes an excellent lining for fireplaces.

What Did Santa Claus Bring You In 1999? (#2)

WEBMASTER OF LINUXSUPERMEGAPORTAL.COM: One of my in-laws gifted me a
CD-ROM containing the text of every "...For Dummies" book ever published.
It's a shame IDG never published "Hiring A Hitman To Knock Off Your
Inlaws... For Dummies", because that's something I'm itching to do. At any
rate, I'm using the CD as a beer coaster.

JESSE BERST: I got a coupon redeemable for the full copy of Windows 2000
when it comes out in February. Win2K is the most innovative,
enterprise-ready, stable, feature-enriched, easy-to-use operating system
on the market. I don't see how Linux can survive against Microsoft's far
superior offering. I ask you: could you get fired for NOT choosing Windows
2000? You bet.

LINUX CONVERT: I kept hinting for a SGI box, but instead my wife got me an
old Packard Bell. Unfortunately, she bought it at CompUSSR, which doesn't
take returns, so I'm stuck with it. I haven't been able to get Linux to
boot on it, so this machine will probably become a $750 paperweight.

Is Linux A Finnish Conspiracy?

WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF CORRUPTION -- According to a report recently
issued by the NSA (No Such Agency), Finland is now considered a national
economic and security risk. "We don't trust the Finns... software written
by these people could potentially contain backdoors that could undermine
domestic security," the report states. In response to the news, US Senator
Fatcatte (R-WA) has proposed a bill, the It's For The Children Act of
2000, that would ban all software written by native-born Finns.

"It's time we take the Finnish threat seriously," Fatcatte said at a press
conference. "Not only is Finn software a threat to domestic tranquility,
but it could radically alter the computer industry, costing us thousandsof jobs... and, more importantly, billions in tax revenue. We must prevent
the Finns from subverting our economy with so-called 'open-source
software'." He then asked, "Is anybody thinking of the children of
programmers who will become unemployed when Finnish software overruns the
country?"

Alan Cox Releases Quantum Kernel
Submitted by Dave Finton

A surprising development in the linux-kernel mailing list surfaced when
Alan Cox announced the release of a 2.2 Linux kernel existing both as an
official stable kernel and as a prepatch kernel. This immediately spurred
the creation of two different realities (and hence two different Alan
Coxes), where a kernel would not settle down to one or the other state
until someone looked at it.

"I think this resulted from the large number of 'final' prepatch kernels
prior to the 2.2.14 release," said David Miller, kernel networking guru
and gas station attendent (he'll settle down to one or the other state
when someone looks at him).

When word of this development spread to Microsoft, Bill Gates was
extremely delighted. The Redmond, WA campus has been plagued with quantum
fluctuations ever since the inception of Windows 2000 back in 1992. "Our
release date has been existing in infinitely many states since the very
beginning," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "This just shows the Linux
operating system cannot scale to multiple realities as well as our OS."

Linux World Domination: Not A Joke!

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Senator Fattecat (R-WA) is pushing for a ban on
Finnish-produced software. His chief of staff, Ms. Dee Septive, has
published a 200-page report revealing "the Helsinkian Underground", a
Finnish world domination plot hatched in 1943.

The Fattecat expose describes Finland's recent scheme involving free
software. "Linux, originally called Freix (FREIX Retrieves Electronic
Intelligence X), is a scheme to infiltrate the Western world with a 'free'
operating system with nasty backdoors hidden within its obfuscated source
code. IRC (Intelligence Relaying Code) is another Finnish innovation
designed for spying purposes."

Linus Torvalds plays a prominent role in the conspiracy. "That old story
about Linus developing a Unix clone in his spare time while at University
is a lark," the report states. "Indeed, the name Linux ("Line X") was
coined because the kernel can extract any arbitrary line of intelligence
from any document it has access to."

New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#1)

Adopt-A-Beowulf: the latest company to hop the Linux bandwagon
as it tramples down Wall Street.

Every geek dreams of owning their own Beowulf supercomputer. Very few
people (except for dotcom billionnaires) can afford to build one, but the
folks at Adopt-a-Beowulf can provide the next best thing: a virtual
beowulf. For US$49.95, you can "adopt" your own 256-node Beowulf cluster.
You won't own it, or even get to see it in person, but you will receive
photos of the cluster, a monthly newsletter about its operation, and a
limited shell account on it.

The company hopes to branch out into other fields. Some slated products
include Adopt-A-Penguin, Lease-A-Camel (for Perl mongers), and
Adopt-A-Distro (in which your name will be used as the code-name for a
beta release of a major Linux distribution or other Open Source project).

New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#2)

Don't throw out that old Red Hat Linux 3.0 CD. A group of entrepreneurs
are hording vintage Linux items in the hopes that they will become hot
collector's items in the coming decades. The venture, called "Money Grows
On Binary Trees", hopes to amass a warehouse full of old Linux
distributions, books, stuffed penguins, promotional material, and Linus
Torvalds autographs.

"Nobody thought pieces of cardstock featuring baseball players would be
worth anything..." the founder of Binary Trees said. "That 'Linux For
Dummies' book sitting in your trash could be the next Babe Ruth card."

The company organized a Linux Collectibles Convention last week in Silicon
Valley, drawing in a respectable crowd of 1,500 people and 20 exhibitors.
The big attraction was a "Windows For Dummies" book actually signed by
Linus Torvalds. "He signed it back at a small Linux conference in '95,"
the owner explained. "He didn't realize it was a Dummies book because I
had placed an O'Reilly cover on it... Somebody at the convention offered
me $10,000 for it, but that seemed awfully low. I hope to sell it on eBay
next month with a reserve price containing a significant number of zeros."

New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#3)

In the "Cathedral and the Bazaar", ESR mentions that one motivation behind
Open Source software is ego-gratification. That's where OpenEgo, Inc.
comes in. For a fee, the hackers at OpenEgo will produce a piece of Open
Source software and distribute it in your name, thus building up your
reputation and ego. You can quickly become the envy of all your friends --
without lifting a finger. Want a higher-paying tech job? With OpenEgo's
services, you'll look like an Open Source pro in no time, and have dozensof hot job offers from across the country.

Says the OpenEgo sales literature, "Designing, implementing, maintaining,
and promoting a successful Open Source project is a pain. However, at
OpenEgo, we do all the work while you reap all the rewards..." A page on
the OpenEgo site claims, "We produced a Linux kernel patch for one
customer last year that was immediately accepted by Linus Torvalds...
Within days the person gained employment at Transmeta and is now on the
road to IPO riches..."

Prices range from $1,000 for a small program to $5,000 for a kernel patch.

New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#4)

The buzz surrounding Linux and Open Source during 1999 has produced a
large number of billionnaires. However, people who weren't employed by Red
Hat or VA Linux, or who didn't receive The Letter, are still poor. The
visionaries at The IPO Factory want to change all that.

As the name suggests, this company helps other businesses get off the
ground, secure investments from Venture Capitalists, and eventually hold
an IPO that exits the stratosphere. "You can think of us as meta-VCs," the
IPO Factory's founder said. "You provide the idea... and we do the rest.
If your company doesn't hold a successful IPO, you get your money back,
guaranteed!" He added quickly, "Of course, if you do undergo a billion
dollar IPO, we get to keep 25% of your stock."

The company's first customer, LinuxOne, has been a failure. "From now on
we're only going to service clients that actually have a viable product,"
an IPO Factory salesperson admitted. "Oh, and we've learned our lesson:
it's not a good idea to cut-and-paste large sections from Red Hat's S-1
filing."

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#2)
(held during Super Bowl Sunday 2000 at the Silicon Valley Transmeta Dome)

BRYANT DUMBELL: Look out! Here comes Linus Torvalds himself to deliver the
starting chug. The crowd is going wild... all 64 people in the stands are
on their feet! Here we go... Linus is lifting up the Ceremonial Beer
Can... he's flipping off the top...

JOHN SPLADDEN: You can feel the excitement in the air! Wow!

DUMBELL: ...And there he goes! Wow... he chugged that beer in only 1.4
seconds... Let's see Bill top that! What a remarkable display to kick off
this grandest of all nerd sporting events.

SPLADDEN: "Nerd sporting event"? Isn't that an oxymoron?

DUMBELL: Linus is now waving to the crowd... Oops! He just belched.

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#1)

JOHN SPLADDEN: Hi, and welcome to the first annual Nerd Bowl in sunny
Silicon Valley.

BRYANT DUMBELL: We're coming to you live from the Transmeta Dome to watch
the battle between the North Carolina Mad Hatters and the Michigan
Portalbacks as they compete for the coveted Linus Torvalds Trophy.

SPLADDEN: This is shaping up to be one hell of a match. The Mad Hatters --
sponsored by Linux distributor Red Hat -- have been on fire the past
month. But the Andover.Net sponsored Michigan Portalbacks are on a tear as
well, thanks in part to the stellar performance of Rob "Taco Boy" Malda.

DUMBELL: Taco Boy is quite a star, John. Last week at the Kernelbowl he
blew away the Transmeta Secret Agents when he scored 51 points
singlehandedly in the Flying CompactDiscus round.

SPLADDEN: But then Mad Hatter's Alan Cox was voted this season's Most
Valuable Hacker in the Eastern Division. So, this game is going to be
quite a show.

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#3)

BRYANT DUMBELL: It's time for Round One: The Flying CompactDiscus.

JOHN SPLADDEN: That's right, Bryant. Each team member will hurl one CD-ROM
and receive points for both the distance thrown and whether the disc is
still readable afterwards.

DUMBELL: First up is Mad Hatter's Alan Cox. He struts, he winds up, and
there it goes! Look at the trajectory on that baby... Now it's time for
the Portalback's Anonymous Coward #521 to throw. This guy was voted as the
best CompactDiscus thrower in the league by popular vote on Slashdot.

SPLADDEN: Indeed, AnonCow has got some powerful muscles. No brain though.
Did you know that he dropped out of college to join the Andover.Net team?

DUMBELL: Yeah, what a tough decision to make. It's now becoming quite
common for nerd superstars to ditch college and move to Silicon Valley and
receive Big League stock options. Still, AnonCow was out for several games
this season due to a Carpal Tunnel flareup. I hope he isn't squandering
his millions... he might be forced to retire early.

JOHN SPLADDEN: This is my favorite part of the Nerdbowl. Each player tries
to consume as many gallons of caffeinated beverages within one minute, and
then points are awarded based on the redness of their eyes.

DUMBELL: I like this event too... I must admit, it's much better than the
"Crash It" event that was played in the Zeroth Annual Nerdbowl last year.
Players were each seated in front of a PC running Windows 98... points
were awarded based on how fast the player could cause a Blue Screen.

SPLADDEN: Ah, yes, I remember that. Everybody complained that the event
was too easy. "Where the hell is the challenge?" yelled Chris DiBona while
doing a victory dance after the VA Linux Rich Penguins beat the SuSE Cats
In The Hats last year 121-96.

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#5)

A commercial that aired during the live ASCII broadcast of the game:

Having trouble staying awake for weeks at a time working on that latest
hack? Worried that some young punk will take over your cushy job because
you sleep too much? Don't worry, EyeOpener« brand cola is here to save
the day. You'll never feel sleepy again when you drink EyeOpener«.

Surgeon General's Warning: This product should only be used under a
doctor's immediate supervision, as it contains more caffeine than 512
cases of Coca-Cola.

Caution: When sleep does occur after about three weeks, optometrists
recommend having someone on hand to close your eyelids.

Coming soon: ExtremelyWired(tm) cola with 50% more sugar! May or may not
meet FDA approval... we're still trying.

Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#6)
(Round 4, the Who Wants To Be A Billionaire? Round)

ERIC RAYMOND (Moderator): Here's the second question: Who is the primary
author of the world-renowned fetchmail program? [Bzzz] Yes, Hemos?

JOHN SPLADDEN: In this final round, the two teams must assemble a 16-node
Beowulf cluster from scratch, install Linux on them, and then use the
system to calculate pi to 1 million digits. This is the ultimate test for
nerds... only people in the Big Leagues should attempt this... [snip]

BRYANT DUMBELL: Look at that! Instead of messing with screws, the
Portalbacks are using duct tape to attach their motherboards to the cases!
That should save some time. [snip] They've done it! The Mad Hatters have
completed the Final Round in 2 hours, 15 minutes. That's one hell of a
Beowulf cluster they produced... drool.

SPLADDEN: With that, the Mad Hatters win the Nerd Bowl 105 to 68! There's
going to be some serious beer-drinking tonight back at the Red Hat offices.

DUMBELL: Linus Torvalds has emerged from the sidelines to present his
Linus Torvalds Trophy to the winners. What a glorious sight! This has
definitely been the best Nerdbowl ever. I pity those people that have been
watching the Superbowl instead.

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As you all know, February 17th was the happy day that Microsoft officially
released Windows 2000. I went down to the local Paperclips computer store
and asked if they had any copies in stock.

One of the pimply-faced Linux longhairs explained that Paperclips didn't
carry Win2K because it is not intended for consumers. What FUD! I can't
believe the gall of those Linux Communists to spread such FUD (Fear,
Uncertainty, and Doubt) about Windows 2000, which is _the_ best, most
stable operating system ever produced in the history of mankind!

Man Charged With Crashing Windows

MOUNTAIN HOME, AR -- Eric Turgent, a closet Linux advocate, was arrested
yesterday for intentionally crashing his co-worker's Windows box at the
offices of the "Roadkill Roundup" newspaper. Turgent disputes the charges,
saying, "If causing an operating system to crash is illegal, than why
isn't Bill Gates serving life without parole?"

Turgent's co-worker, Mr. Stu Poor, the clueless technology pundit for the
newspaper, is a heavy Microsoft supporter. He frequently brags in his
weekly Tech Talk column that he "once had a conversation with Bill Gates."
A heated argument broke out yesterday morning in which the two insulted
each other ("You're nothing but a Linux hippie freak on the Red Hat
payroll!" vs. "You make Jesse Berst and Fred Moody look like [expletive]
geniuses!") for two hours.

At the heat of the moment, Turgent shoved Poor aside and typed in
"C:\CON\CON". The machine crashed and the pundit lost all of his work (a
real loss to humanity, to be sure). Turgent is in jail awaiting trial for
violating the "Slash Crashes Act". This bill was enacted in 1999 after a
Senator's gigabyte cache of pornography was destroyed by a Windows crash.

Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster

Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one,
much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker
famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on
a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC.

"Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster
will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not
really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node
cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses."

Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built
a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing
calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s.

He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us
yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which
each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which
each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running
old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked.

Anatomy Of A Ziff-Davis Pundit
Collected Jesse Berst ramblings from the past few years:

"I've always said Linux could be a serious challenger."

"Could you get fired for choosing Linux?"

"Linux won't beat Microsoft."

"But in some situations, Linux makes sense."

"Linux will never go mainstream."

"We've been writing about the alternative OS for a long time
now. Watching its slow, steady ascent."

Another Satisfied

MICROSOFT Customer...

+----------+ As the inventor of the Internet, I know a
| | quality server operating system when I see
| SMILING | one. Microsoft Windows 2000(tm) provides
| | innovative features that no other competitor
| GORE | can claim.
| |
| PHOTO | We've been using Windows at the White House
| | for five years now without any problems.
| | Windows' BlueScreen(tm) technology
+----------+ automatically crashes our Exchange(tm) email
server whenever Federal investigators are
Al Gore around. Thanks to this feature, archives of
incriminating emails have been wiped clean.
This is what I call innovation. Thank you,
Microsoft!

Will Silicon Valley Become A Ghost Town?

Back in the 80s, businessmen hoped that computers would usher in a
paperless office. Now in the 00s, businessmen are hoping that paper will
usher in a computerless office. "We've lost more productivity this last
decade to shoddy software," explained Mr. Lou Dight, the author of the
bestselling book, "The Dotless Revolution". "By getting rid of computers
and their infernal crashes, bluescreens, and worst of all, Solitaire, the
US gross domestic product will soar by 20% over the next decade. It's time
to banish Microsoft crapware from our corporate offices."

Lou Dight is the champion of a new trend in corporate America towards the
return of pen-and-paper, solar calculators, old IBM typewriters, and even
slide rules. If "dotcom" was the buzzword of the 90s, "dotless" is the
buzzword of the 21st Century.

What I'd like to see is a prohibition on Microsoft incorporating
multi-megabyte Easter Eggs and other stupid bloatware into Windows and
Office. A typical computer with pre-installed Microsoft shoveware probably
only has about 3 megabytes of hard drive space free because of flight
simulators, pinball games, and multimedia credits Easter Eggs that nobody
wants. I predict that if Microsoft is ever forced to remove these things,
the typical user will actually be able to purchase competing software now
that they have some free space to put it on. Of course, stock in hard
drive companies might plummet...

-- Anonymous Coward, when asked by Humorix for his reaction
to the proposed Microsoft two-way split

The new "I Love You" virus is not the work of some snot-nosed acne-laced
teenager working from a basement in the Phillipines. It's actually part of
a conspiracy concocted by the unholy alliance of Microsoft and several
well-known and well-despised spammers.

You'll notice that the ILOVEYOU, Melissa, and Tuxissa strains all extract
email addresses from the victim's system. This is a gold mine for
spammers, who are able to use these viruses to harvest active email
addresses for them. Everytime ILOVEYOU, for instance, propogates, it keeps
track of all the email addresses it has been sent to, so that when it
finally boomerangs back to a spammer, they have a nice convenient list of
addresses to send "laser printer toner" and "get rich quick!"
advertisements to.

-- Bob Smith (not his real code-name), in a speech given at the
First Annual Connecticut Conspiracy Convention (ConConCon),
"the largest ever gathering of conspiracy theorists east of the
Mississippi."

Right now hundreds of Anonymous Cowards are cheering the fact that only
Windows boobs are victims of ILOVEYOU and other email viruses. I realize
Outlook is so insecure that using it is like posting a sign outside your
door saying, "DOOR UNLOCKED -- ROB ME!". However, Linux isn't immune. If I
had a dollar for every pine buffer overflow uncovered, I could buy a
truckload of fresh herring.

I expect the next mass email virus to spread will be cross-platform. If
the recipient is a Windows/Outlook luser, they'll get hit. If the
recipient is a Linux/pine user, they'll find themselves staring at a
self-executing bash script that's has just allocated 1 petabyte of memory
and crashed the system (or worse).

Either that or the next mass email virus will only damage Linux systems. I
can just see Bill Gates assigning some junior programmer that very task.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.

-- A speech given at the First Annual Connecticut Conspiracy]
Convention (ConConCon) by an anonymous creature said to
be "wearing what appeared to be a tuxedo".

Security Holes Found In Microsoft Easter Eggs

REDMOND, WA -- It's damage control time for the Microsoft Marketing
Machine. Not only have exploits been found in IE, Outlook, and even the
Dancing Paper Clip, but now holes have been uncovered in Excel's Flight
Simulator and Word's pinball game.

"If you enter Excel 97's flight simulator and then hit the F1, X, and
SysRq keys while reading a file from Drive A:, you automatically gain
Administrator rights on Windows NT," explained the security expert who
first discovered the problem. "And that's just the tip of the iceberg."

Office 97 and 2000 both contain two hidden DLLs, billrulez.dll and
eastereggs.dll, that are marked as "Safe for scripting" but are not.
Arbitrary Visual BASIC code can be executed using these files. More
disturbing, however, are the undocumented API calls
"ChangeAllPasswordsToDefault", "OpenBackDoor", "InitiateBlueScreenNow",
and "UploadRegistryToMicrosoft" within easter~1.dll.

HELL, MICHIGAN -- A group of long-time Linux zealots and newbie haters
have thrown together a new Linux distro called Hellix that is so
user-hostile, so anti-newbie, so cryptic, and so old-fashioned that it
actually makes MS-DOS look like a real operating system. Said the founderof the project, "I'm sick and tired of the Windowsification of the Linux
desktop in a fruitless attempt to make the system more appealing to
newbies, PHBs, and MCSEs. Linux has always been for nerds only, and we
want to make sure it stays that way!"

One of the other Bastard Distributors From Hell explained, "In the last
five years think of all the hacking effort spent on Linux... and for what?
We have nothing to show for it but half-finished Windows-like desktops, vi
dancing paperclips, and graphical front-ends to configuration files. Real
nerds use text files for configuration, darnit, and they like it! It's
time to take a stand against the hordes of newbies that are polluting our
exclusive operating system."

One Anonymous Coward said, "This is so cool... It's just like Unix back in
the good old days of the 70's when men were men and the only intuitive
interface was still the nipple."

Brief History Of Linux (#1)
Re-Inventing the Wheel

Our journey through the history of Linux begins ca. 28000 B.C. when a
large all-powerful company called MoogaSoft monopolized the wheel-making
industry. As founder of the company, Billga Googagates (rumored to be the
distant ancestor of Bill Gates) was the wealthiest man in the known world,
owning several large rock huts, an extravagant collection of artwork (cave
paintings), and a whole army of servants and soldiers.

MoogaSoft's unfair business practices were irritating, but users were
unable to do anything about them, lest they be clubbed to death by
MoogaSoft's army. Nevertheless, one small group of hobbyists finally got
fed up and starting hacking their own wheels out of solid rock. Their
spirit of cooperation led to better and better wheels that eventually
outperformed MoogaSoft offerings.

MoogaSoft tried desperately to stop the hobbyists -- as shown by the
recently unearthed "Ooga! Document" -- but failed. Ironically, Billga
Googagates was killed shortly afterwards when one his own 900-pound wheels
crushed him.

Brief History Of Linux (#2)
Hammurabi's Open-Source Code

Hammurabi became king of Babylonia around 1750BC. Under his reign, a
sophisticated legal code developed; Version 1, containing 282 clauses, was
carved into a large rock column open to the public. However, the code
contained several errors (Hammurabi must have been drunk), which numerous
citizens demanded be fixed.

One particularly brave Babylonian submitted to the king's court a stack of
cloth patches that, when affixed to the column, would cover up and correct
the errors. With the king's approval, these patches were applied to the
legal code; within a month a new corrected rock column (Version 2.0) was
officially announced. While future kings never embraced this idea (who
wanted to admit they made a mistake?), the concept of submitting patches
to fix problems is now taken for granted in modern times.

Brief History Of Linux (#3)
Lawyers Unite

Humanity faced a tremendous setback ca. 1100 A.D., when the first law
school was established in Bologna. Ironically, the free exchange of ideas
at the law school spurred the law students to invent new ways (patents,
trademarks, copyrights) to stifle the free exchange of ideas in other
industries.

If, at some point in the future, you happen upon a time machine, we here
at Humorix (and, indeed, the whole world) implore you to travel back to
1100, track down a law teacher called Irnerius, and prevent him from
founding his school using whatever means necessary. Your contribution to
humanity will truly make the world (in an alternate timeline) a better
place.

Brief History Of Linux (#4)
Walls & Windows

Most people don't realize that many of the technological innovations taken
for granted in the 20th Century date back centuries ago. The concept of a
network "firewall", for instance, is a product of the Great Wall of China,
a crude attempt to keep raging forest fires out of Chinese territory. It
was soon discovered that the Wall also kept Asian intruders ("steppe
kiddies") out, just as modern-day firewalls keep network intruders
("script kiddies") out.

Meanwhile, modern terminology for graphical user interfaces originated
from Pre-Columbian peoples in Central and South America. These natives
would drag-and-drop icons (sculptures of the gods) into vast pits of
certain gooey substances during a ritual in which "mice" (musical
instruments that made a strange clicking sound) were played to an eerie
beat.

Brief History Of Linux (#5)
English Flame War

The idea behind Slashdot-style discussions is not new; it dates back to
London in 1699. A newspaper that regularly printed Letters To The Editor
sparked a heated debate over the question, "When would the 18th Century
actually begin, 1700 or 1701?" The controversy quickly became a matter of
pride; learned aristocrats argued for the correct date, 1701, while others
maintained that it was really 1700. Another sizable third of participants
asked, "Who cares?"

Ordinarily such a trivial matter would have died down, except that one
1700er, fed up with the snobbest 1701 rhetoric of the educated class,
tracked down one letter-writer and hurled a flaming log into his manor
house in spite. The resulting fire was quickly doused, but the practice
known as the "flame war" had been born. More flames were exchanged between
other 1700ers and 1701ers for several days, until the Monarch sent out
royal troops to end the flamage.

Brief History Of Linux (#6)
California Goldrush

Now we skip ahead to California in 1849, when the discovery of gold at
Sutter's Mill set the stage for countless prospectors (Fortyniners) to
travel West in the hopes to get-rich-quick by finding gold in them thar
hills.

What's the connection with Linux, you ask? Well, the same thing happened
exactly 150 years later, in 1999. The discovery of Venture Capital at Red
Hat set the stage for countless investors (Ninetyniners) to travel West in
the hopes to get-rich-quick by finding hot IPOs in them thar Linux
companies.

Brief History Of Linux (#7)
The Rise of Geeks

The late 19th Century saw the rise and fall of "geeks", wild carnival
performers who bit the heads off live chickens. This vocal minority,
outcast from mainstream society, clamored for respect, but failed. Their
de facto spokesman, Tom Splatz, tried to expose America to their plight in
his 312-page book, "Geeks".

In the book Splatz documented the life of two Idahoan geeks with no social
life as they made a meager living traveling the Pacific Northwest in
circuses. While Splatz's masterpiece was a commercial failure, the book
did set a world record for using the term "geek" a total of 6,143 times.

Brief History Of Linux (#8)
Let's all holler for Hollerith

In 1890 the US Congress wanted to extend the census to collect exhaustive
demographic information on each citizen that could be resold to marketing
companies to help pay for the newly installed gold-plated toilets on
Capitol Hill. Experts estimated that the 1890 Census wouldn't be completed
until 1900. It was hoped that an electronic tabulating machine using
punchcards designed by Herman Hollerith would speed up the process.

It didn't quite work out that way. An infestation of termites ate their
way through the wooden base of Hollerith's machines, and then a wave of
insects devoured several stacks of punchcards. Also, some Hollerith
models had the propensity to crash at the drop of a hat... literally. In
one instance, the operator dropped his hat and when he reached down to
pick it up, he bumped the machine, causing it to flip over and crash.

These flaws meant that the census was delayed for several years. However,
the system was, in the words of one newspaper reporter, "good enough for
government work", a guiding principle that lives on to this very day and
explains the government's insistence on using Windows-based PCs.

Brief History Of Linux (#9)
Edison's most important invention

One of Thomas Edison's most profound inventions was that of patent
litigation. Edison used his many patents on motion pictures to monopolize
the motion picture industry. One could argue that Edison was an early
pioneer for the business tactics employed by Microsoft and the MPAA.

Indeed, Edison's company, the Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC), formed
in 1908, bears a striking resemblance to the modern-day Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA). Similar initials, different people, same
evil. The MPCC, with the help of hired thugs, ensured that all motion
picture producers paid tribute to Edison and played by his rules. The
MPAA, with the help of hired lawyers, ensures that all motion picture
producers pay tribute and play by their rules.

Ironically, filmmakers that found themselves facing Edison patent
litigation (or worse) fled to Texas, California, and Mexico. Those same
filmmakers outlasted Edison's monopoly and eventually banded together to
form the MPAA! History has a tendency to repeat itself; so it seems likely
that today's DVD lawsuit victims may well come to power in the future --
and soon become the evil establishment, thus completing another cycle.

Brief History Of Linux (#10)
The AnyQuack Computer

One electronic machine, Colossus, was used by the British in World War II
to decode Nazi transmissions. The code-breakers were quite successful in
their mission, except for the tiny detail that nobody knew how to read
German. They had decoded unreadable messages into... unreadable messages.

Two years later in 1945, a group of professors and students at the Univ.of Pennsylvania were discussing computing theory. An argument ensued, in
which one professor yelled, "Any quack can build an electronic computer!
The real challenge is building one that doesn't crash every five minutes."

One graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., responded, "I'm any quack!
I'll take you up on that challenge. I'll build a device that can calculate
1,000 digits of pi in one hour... without crashing!" Several professors
laughed; "Such high-speed calculations are beyond our level of technology."

Eckert and his friends did build such a device. As a joke, he called the
machine "AnyQuack", which eventually became ENIAC -- ENIAC's Not Intended
As Crashware, the first known example of a self-referential acronym.

Brief History Of Linux (#11)
Birth of Gates and the Anti-Gates

October 28, 1955 saw the birth of William H. Gates, who would rise above
his humble beginnings as the son of Seattle's most powerful millionaire
lawyer and become the World's Richest Man(tm). A classic American
rags-to-riches story (with "rags" referring to the dollar bills that the
Gates family used for toilet paper), Bill Gates is now regarded as the
world's most respected businessman by millions of clueless people that
have obviously never touched a Windows machine.

Nature is all about balance. The birth of Gates in 1955 tipped the cosmic
scales toward evil, but the birth of Linus Torvalds in 1969 finally
balanced them out. Linus' destiny as the savior of Unix and the slayer of
money-breathing Redmond dragons was sealed when, just mere hours after his
birth, the Unix epoch began January 1st, 1970. While the baseline for Unix
timekeeping might be arbitrary, we here at Humorix like to thank the its
proximity of Linus' birth is no coincidence.

Brief History Of Linux (#12)
A note from Bill Gates' second grade teacher:

Billy has been having some trouble behaving in class lately... Last Monday
he horded all of the crayons and refused to share, saying that he needed
all 160 colors to maximize his 'innovation'. He then proceeded to sell
little pieces of paper ("End-User License Agreement for Crayons" he called
them) granting his classmates the 'non-transferable right' to use the
crayons on a limited time basis in exchange for their lunch money...

When I tried to stop Billy, he kept harping about his right to innovate
and how my interference violated basic notions of free-market capitalism.
"Holding a monopoly is not illegal," he rebutted. I chastised him for
talking back, and then I took away the box of crayons so others could
share them... angrily, he then pointed to a drawing of his hanging on the
wall and yelled, "That's my picture! You don't have the right to present
my copyrighted material in a public exhibition without my permission!
You're pirating my intellectual property. Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!"

I developed a headache that day that even the maximum dosage of Aspirin
wasn't able to handle. And then on Tuesday, he conned several students outof their milk money by convincing them to play three-card Monty...

Brief History Of Linux (#13)
Wanted: Eunuchs programmers

Everything you know about the creation of the Unix operating system is
wrong. We have uncovered the truth: Unix was a conspiracy hatched by
Ritchie and Thompson to thwart the AT&T monopoly that they worked for. The
system, code-named EUNUCHS (Electronic UNtrustworthy User-Condemning
Horrible System), was horribly conceived, just as they had planned.

The OS, quickly renamed to a more respectable "Unix", was adopted first by
Ma Bell's Patent Department and then by the rest of the monopoly. AT&T saw
an inexpensive, multi-user, portable operating system that it had all
rights to; the authors, however, saw a horrible, multi-crashing system
that the Evil Ma Bell Empire would become hopelessly dependent on. AT&T
would go bankrupt trying to maintain the system and eventually collapse.

That didn't happen. Ritchie and Thompson were too talented to create a
crappy operating system; no matter how hard they tried the system was too
good. Their last ditch effort to sabotage the system by recoding it
obfuscated C was unsuccessful. Before long Unix spread outside of Bell
Labs and their conspiracy collapsed.

Brief History Of Linux (#14)
Military Intelligence: Not an oxymoron in 1969

It was the Department Of Defense that commissioned the ARPANET in 1969, a
rare example of the US military breaking away from its official motto,
"The Leading Edge Of Yesterday's Technology(tm)".

In the years leading up to 1969, packet switching technology had evolved
enough to make the ARPANET possible. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.
received the ARPA contract in 1968 for packet switching "Interface Message
Processors". US Senator Edward Kennedy, always on the ball, sent a
telegram to BBN praising them for their non-denominational "Interfaith"
Message Processors, an act unsurpassed by elected representatives until Al
Gore invented the Internet years later.

While ARPANET started with only four nodes in 1969, it evolved rapidly.
Email was first used in 1971; by 1975 the first mailing list, MsgGroup,
was created by Steve Walker when he sent a "First post!" messages to it.
In 1979 all productive use of ARPANET ceased when USENET and the first MUD
were created. In 1983, when the network surpassed 1,000 hosts, a study
showed that 90.4% of all traffic was devoted to email and USENET flame wars.

Brief History Of Linux (#15)
Too many hyphens: Traf-O-Data and Micro-soft

Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended an exclusive private school in Seattle.
In 1968, after raising $3,000 from a yard sale, they gained access to a
timeshare computer and became addicted. After depleting their money
learning BASIC and playing Solitaire, they convinced a company to give
them free computer time in exchange for reporting bugs -- ironically, an
early form of Open Source development!

The two then founded a small company called Traf-O-Data that collected and
analyzed traffic counts for municipalities using a crude device based on
the Intel "Pretanium" 8008 CPU. They had some success at first, but ran
into problems when they were unable to deliver their much hyped
next-generation device called "TrafficX". An engineer is quoted as saying
that "Traf-O-Data is the local leader in vaporware", the first documented
usage of the term that has come to be synonymous with Bill Gates.

Soon thereafter, the two developed their own BASIC interpreter, and sold
it to MITS for their new Altair computer. April 4, 1975 is the fateful day
that Micro-soft was founded in Albuquerque, NM as a language vendor.

Brief History Of Linux (#16)
Closed source, opened wallets

In 1976 Bill Gates wrote the famous letter to Altair hobbyists accusing
them of "stealing software" and "preventing good software from being
written". We must assume Bill's statement was true, because no good
software was being written at Micro-soft.

Bill Gates did not innovate the concept of charging megabucks for
software, but he was the first to make megabucks from peddling commercial
software.

Brief History Of Linux (#17)
If only Gary had been sober

When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979, most of its revenue came from
sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti
looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising
programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth
University to issue a public apology in 1986.)

However, by 1981 BASIC hit the backburner to what is now considered the
luckiest break in the history of computing: MS-DOS. (We use the term
"break" because MS-DOS was and always will be broken.) IBM was developing
a 16-bit "personal computer" and desperately needed an OS to drive it.

Their first choice was Gary Kildall's CP/M, but IBM never struck a deal
with him. We've discovered the true reason: Kildall was drunk at the time
the IBM representatives went to talk with him. A sober man would not have
insulted the reps, calling their employer an "Incredibly Bad Monopoly" and
referring to their new IBM-PC as an "Idealistically Backwards
Microcomputer for People without Clues". Needless to say, Gary "I Lost The
Deal Of The Century" Kildall was not sober.

Brief History Of Linux (#17)
Terrible calamity

IBM chose Microsoft's Quick & Dirty Operating System instead of CP/M for
its new line of PCs. QDOS (along with the abomination known as EDLIN) had
been acquired from a Seattle man, Tim Paterson, for the paltry sum of
$50,000. "Quick" and "Dirty" were truly an accurate description of this
system, because IBM's quality assurance department discovered 300 bugs in
QDOS's 8,000 lines of assember code (that's about 1 bug per 27 lines --
which, at the time, was appalling, but compared with Windows 98 today, it
really wasn't that shabby).

Thanks in part to IBM's new marketing slogan, "Nobody Ever Got Fired For
Choosing IBM(tm)", and the release of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program
that everybody and their brother wanted, IBM PCs running DOS flew off the
shelves and, unfortunately, secured Microsoft's runaway success. Bill
Gates was now on his way to the Billionaire's Club; his days as a mediocre
programmer were long gone: he was now a Suit. The only lines of code he
would ever see would be the passcodes to his Swiss bank accounts.

Brief History Of Linux (#18)
There are lies, damned lies, and Microsoft brochures

Even from the very first day, the Microsoft Marketing Department was at
full throttle. Vaporware has always been their weapon of choice. Back when
MS-DOS 1.25 was released to OEMs, Microsoft handed out brochures touting
some of the features to be included in future versions, including:
Xenix-compatible pipes, process forks, multitasking, graphics and cursor
positioning, and multi-user support.

The brochure also stated, "MS-DOS has no practical limit on disk size.
MS-DOS uses 4-byte Xenix compatible pointers for file and disk capacity up
to 4 gigabytes." We would like to emphasize in true Dave Barry fashion
that we are not making this up.

Big vaporous plans were also in store for Microsoft's "Apple Killer"
graphical interface. In 1983 Microsoft innovated a new marketing ploy --
the rigged "smoke-and-mirrors" demo -- to showcase the "overlapping
windows" and "multitasking" features of Interface Manager, the predecessor
to Windows. These features never made it into Windows 1.0 -- which,
incidentally, was released 1.5 years behind schedule.

Brief History Of Linux (#18)
The rise and rise of the Microsoft Empire

The DOS and Windows releases kept coming, and much to everyone's surprise,
Microsoft became more and more successful. This brought much frustration
to computer experts who kept predicting the demise of Microsoft and the
rise of Macintosh, Unix, and OS/2.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft, which was the prime reason
that DOS and Windows prevailed. Oh, and DOS had better games as well,
which we all know is the most important feature an OS can have.

In 1986 Microsoft's continued success prompted the company to undergo a
wildly successful IPO. Afterwards, Microsoft and Chairman Bill had
accumulated enough money to acquire small countries without missing a
step, but all that money couldn't buy quality software. Gates could,
however, buy enough marketing and hype to keep MS-DOS (Maybe Some Day an
Operating System) and Windows (Will Install Needless Data On While System)
as the dominant platforms, so quality didn't matter. This fact was
demonstrated in Microsoft's short-lived slogan from 1988, "At Microsoft,
quality is job 1.1".

Brief History Of Linux (#19)
Boy meets operating system

The young Linus Torvalds might have been just another CompSci student if
it wasn't for his experiences in the Univ. of Helsinki's Fall 1990 Unix &
C course. During one class, the professor experienced difficulty getting
Minix to work properly on a Sun box. "Who the heck designed this thing?"
the angry prof asked, and somebody responded, "Andrew Tanenbaum".

The name of the Unix & C professor has already escaped from Linus, but the
words he spoke next remain forever etched in his grey matter:
"Tanenbaum... ah, yes, that Amsterdam weenie who thinks microkernels are
the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, they're not. I would just
love to see somebody create their own superior Unix-like 32-bit operating
system using a monolithic kernel just to show Tanenbaum up!"

His professor's outburst inspired Linus to order a new IBM PC so he could
hack Minix. You can probably guess what happened next. Inspired by his
professor's words, Linus Torvalds hacks together his own superior
Unix-like 32-but operating system using a monolithic kernel just to show
Mr. Christmas Tree up.

Brief History Of Linux (#20)
Linux is born

Linus' superhuman programming talent produced, within a year, a full
operating system that rivaled Minix. The first official announcement on
comp.os.minix came October 5th, in which Linus wrote these famous words:

Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Do you want to cut your teeth on an operating
system that will achieve world domination within 15 years? Want to get
rich quick by the end of the century by taking money from hordes of
venture capitalists and clueless Wall Street suits? Need to get even
with Bill Gates but don't know what to do except throw cream pies at
him? Then this post might just be for you :-)

Linux (which was known as "Lindows", "Freax", and "Billsux" for short
periods in 1991) hit the bigtime on January 5, 1992 (exactly one year
after Linus wasn't hit by a bus) when version 0.12 was released under the
GNU GPL. Linus called his creation a "better Minix than Minix"; the famous
Linus vs. Tanenbaum flamewar erupted soon thereafter on January 29th and
injured several Usenet bystanders.

Brief History Of Linux (#21)
The GNU Project

Meet Richard M. Stallman, an MIT hacker who would found the GNU Project
and create Emacs, the operating-system-disguised-as-a-text-editor. RMS,
the first member of the Three Initials Club (joined by ESR and JWZ),
experienced such frustration with software wrapped in arcane license
agreements that he embarked on the GNU Project to produce free software.

His journey began when he noticed this fine print for a printer driver:

You do not own this software. You own a license to use one copy of this
software, a license that we can revoke at any time for any reason
whatsoever without a refund. You may not copy, distribute, alter,
disassemble, or hack the software. The source code is locked away in a
vault in Cleveland. If you say anything negative about this software
you will be in violation of this license and required to forfeit your
soul and/or first born child to us.

The harsh wording of the license shocked RMS. The computer industry was in
it's infancy, which could only mean it was going to get much, much worse.

Brief History Of Linux (#22)

RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was
held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were
monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a
copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of
corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights.

Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To
him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful
utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty
everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a
passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist.

RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright
Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel,
compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down
with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built
with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs
became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a
short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel.

Brief History Of Linux (#23)

Linus Torvalds certainly wasn't the only person to create their own
operating system from scratch. Other people working from their leaky
basements did create their own systems and now they are sick that they
didn't become an Alpha Geek like Torvalds or a Beta Geek like Alan Cox.

Linus had one advantage not many else did: Internet access. The world was
full of half-implemented-Unix-kernels at the time, but they were sitting
isolated on some hacker's hard drive, destined to be destroyed by a hard
drive crash. Thankfully that never happened to Linux, mostly because
everyone with Net access could download a copy instead of paying shipping
charges to receive the code on a huge stack of unreliable floppy disks.

Indeed, buried deep within a landfill in Lansing, Michigan sits a stack of
still-readable 5-1/4 floppies containing the only known copy of "Windows
Killer", a fully functional Unix kernel so elegant, so efficient, so
easy-to-use that Ken Thompson himself would be jealous of its design.
Unfortunately the author's mother threw out the stack of floppies in a
bout of spring cleaning. The 14 year old author's talents were lost
forever as his parents sent him to Law School.

Brief History Of Linux (#24)
Linus Torvalds quotes from his interview in "LinuxNews" (October 1992):

"I doubt Linux will be here to stay, and maybe Hurd is the wave of the
future (and maybe not)..."

"I'm most certainly going to continue to support it, until it either dies
out or merges with something else. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll make
weekly patches for the rest of my life, but hopefully they won't be needed
as much when things stabilize." [If only he knew what he was getting into.]

"World domination? No, I'm not interested in that. Galactic domination, on
the other hand..."

"Several people have already wondered if Linux should adopt a logo or
mascot. Somebody even suggested a penguin for some strange reason, which I
don't particularly like: how is a flightless bird supposed to represent an
operating system? Well, it might work okay for Microsoft or even Minix..."

"I would give Andy Tanenbaum a big fat 'F'."

Brief History Of Linux (#25)

By the mid-1990's the Linux community was burgeoning as countless geeks
fled Redmond monopolistic oppression, Armonk cluelessness, and Cupertino
click-and-drool reality distortion fields. By late 1991 there was an
informal Linux User Group in Finland, although its primary focus was Linux
advocacy, not drinking beer and telling Microsoft jokes as most do today.

Kernel development continued at a steady clip, with more and more people
joining in and hoping that their patches would be accepted by the
Benevolent Dictator himself. To have a patch accepted by Linus was like
winning the Nobel Prize, but to face rejection was like being rejected
from Clown College. The reputation game certainly sparked some flame wars.

One of the most memorable crisis was over the behavior of the delete and
backspace keys. A certain faction of hackers wanted the Backspace key to
actually backspace and the Delete key to actually delete. Linus wasn't too
keen on the proposed changes; "It Works For Me(tm)" is all he said. Some
observers now think Linus was pulling rank to get back at the unknown
hacker who managed to slip a patch by him that replaced the "Kernel panic"
error with "Kernel panic: Linus probably fscked it all up again".

Brief History Of Linux (#26)

On the surface, Transmeta was a secretive startup that hired Linus
Torvalds in 1996 as their Alpha Geek to help develop some kind of
microprocessor. Linus, everyone found out later, was actually hired as
part of a low-budget yet high-yield publicity stunt. While other dotcoms
were burning millions on glitzy marketing campaigns nobody remembers and
Superbowl ads displayed while jocks went to the bathroom, Transmeta was
spending only pocket change on marketing. Most of that pocket change went
towards hosting the Transmeta website (the one that wasn't there yet)
which, incidentally, contained more original content and received more
visitors than the typical dotcom portal.

Microsoft relies on vaporware and certain ahem stipends given to
journalists in order to generate buzz and hype for new products, but
Transmeta only needed Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Personality Cultof Linus to build up its buzz. When the secret was finally unveiled, the
Slashdot crowd was all excited about low-power mobile processors and
code-morphing algorithms -- for a couple days. Then everyone yawned and
went back to playing Quake. It's still not entirely clear when Transmeta
is actually supposed to start selling something.

Brief History Of Linux (#27)

Microsoft's position as the 5,000 pound gorilla of the computer industry
didn't change during the 1990's. Indeed, this gorilla got even more
bloated with every passing Windows release. Bill Gates' business strategy
was simple:

With such a plan Microsoft couldn't fail. That is, unless some external
force popped up and ruined everything. Such as Linux and the Internet
perhaps. Both of these developments were well-known to Bill Gates in the
early and mid 1990's (a company as large as Microsoft can afford a decent
spy network, after all). He just considered both to be mere fads that
would go away when Microsoft announced some new innovation, like PDAs --
Personal Desktop Agents (i.e. Bob and Clippit).

Brief History Of Linux (#28)
Free, Open, Libre, Whatever Software

Eric S. Raymond's now famous paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", set
the stage for the lucrative business of giving software away. In CatB, ESR
likened the software industry to an anarchistic bazaar, with each vendor
looking out for himself, trying to hoodwink customers and fellow vendors.
The produce vendor (i.e. Apple), for instance, felt no need to cooperate
with the crystal-ball seller (Oracle) or the con artist hocking miracle
drugs (Microsoft). Each kept their property and trade secrets to
themselves, hoping to gain an edge and make money fast. "With enough
eyeballs, all bug-ridden software programs are marketable," ESR observed.

ESR contrasted the "caveat emptor" Bazaar to an idealistic Cathedral model
used by free software developers. European cathedrals of medieval days
were built block-by-block with extensive volunteer manpower from the
surrounding community. Such projects were "open" in the sense that
everybody could see their progress, and interested people could wander
inside and offer comments or praise about construction methods. "Those
medieval cathedrals are still standing," ESR mused. "But bazaars built in
the 14th Century are long gone, a victim of their inferior nature."

Brief History Of Linux (#29)

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is credited by many (especially ESR
himself) as the reason Netscape announced January 22, 1998 the release of
the Mozilla source code. In addition, Rob Malda of Slashdot has also
received praise because he had recently published an editorial ("Give us
the damn source code so we can fix Netscape's problems ourselves!")

Of course, historians now know the true reason behind the landmark
decision: Netscape engineers were scared to death that a large
multi-national corporation would acquire them and crush Mozilla. Which
indeed did happen much later, although everybody thought the conqueror
would be Microsoft, not AOL (America's Online Lusers).

The Netscape announcement prompted a strategy session among Linux bigwigs
on February 3rd. They decided a new term to replace 'free software' was
needed; some rejected suggestions included "Free Source", "Ajar Source",
"World Domination Source", "bong-ware" (Bong's Obviously Not GNU), and
"Nude Source". We can thank Chris Peterson for coining "Open Source",
which became the adopted term and later sparked the ugly "Free Software
vs. Open Source", "Raymond vs. Stallman" flame-a-thons.

Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Microsoft Shareholder's Children?

The Evil Monopoly will soon be a duopoly of MICROS~1 and MICROS~2 now that
Judge Jackson has made his ruling. Geeks everywhere are shedding tears of
joy, while Microsoft investors are shedding real tears. But not everybody
is ecstatic about the ruling. "It dawned on me today that if Microsoft is
broken up, we won't have anyone to bash anymore. We can have that," said
Rob Graustein, the founder of the new "Save Microsoft Now! Campaign".

Rob continued, "I know what you're thinking! I have not been
assimilated... er, hired... by Microsoft. I'm not crazy. I haven't been
paid off. My life as a geek revolves around bashing Microsoft. I mean, I
own the world's largest collection of anti-Microsoft T-shirts and
underwear. It's time to take a stand against the elimination of Geek Enemy
#1."

Most observers agree that Mr. Graustein's brain has gone 404. "This guy is
nuts! Support Microsoft? I can't believe I'm hearing this. Even fake news
sites couldn't make up this kind of insanity."

-- Comment embedded in Linux kernel 2.6.15 after Linus Torvalds
decided to get-rich-quick by placing "comment-verts" in the code

Anonymous Noncoward writes, "For my Economics 101 class, I have to pretend
to be Bill Gates and write an editorial defending Microsoft against
anti-trust charges, citing economic principles. To complete such an
assignment violates every moral fiber of my body. What should I do?"

The Oracle responds: Well, it seems that you have to make a decision among
two choices. You can blow off the assignment, thus forcing you to fail
EC101, lowering your GPA below the required minimum to keep your
scholarship, causing you to drop out of college and work at McDonalds all
your life. Or you can write a paper that's positive towards Microsoft and
make an 'A'. This seems like a no-brainer to me; I'd choose the first
option without hesitation -- a burger flipper has far more dignity and
self-respect than somebody who utters a positive statement about the Evil
Empire.

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EyeOpener(tm): You'll Never Waste Another Millisecond Ever Again.

DeCSS T-Shirt Used To Commit Piracy!

College student Cody Potter stunned the world yesterday when he used a
T-shirt with the printed DeCSS source code to illegally copy a DVD of
"Star Trek XXI: We Promise This Is The Last One". Well, it wasn't the
actual DeCSS source code. The shirt contained a Perl script which spits
out a bash shell script which produces a GW-BASIC program which outputs a
ROT13-encoded Python script that manufactures a Pig-Latin-encoded Java
program that finally produces the real DeCSS C source code when executed.

"Brown Orifice" Is Only The Beginning

Last week security holes were found in Netscape's Java implementation that
allowed it to act as a web server. Earlier today, a hacker announced that
he had found vulnerabilities in Mozilla M17 that allow it to operate as a
web browser. And that's just the beginning.

Said "3l337h4x0r", the discoverer of the M17 exploit, "This is quite a
hack! By manipulating some internal functions, I was able to use M17 to
actually surf the web. Slashdot and Humorix rendered beautifully."

Mozilla engineers were stunned. "This shouldn't be possible. M17 contains
a newsreader, a mail client, an instant messenger client, and a whole
bunch of XUL acronymn-enriched stuff, but it shouldn't be able to handle
HTTP or HTML. We haven't been planning on adding web-surfing functionality
to Mozilla until M30... maybe M25 at the earliest. I suspect this whole
thing is a hoax."

Look Out! It's Microsoft Outlook

An old maxim in the Unix community states, "All programs expand until they
can read mail... except Microsoft Outlook." Well, that's no longer true.
By taking advantage of loopholes in several undocumented APIs, a team of
geeks were able to transform Outlook from a virus-delivery system into an
actual mail client.

"It was quite a feat to accomplish this," said one of the geeks. "I mean,
the rat's nest that is the Windows API can be used to frighten small
children... or adults. And the frequency by which Outlook exploits are
discovered is directly proportional to the number of times Bill Gates uses
the word 'innovation'. But this is the first time somebody has discovered
a beneficial exploit."

Microsoft has vowed to release a patch to fix the uncovered security
flaws. "We simply cannot tolerate unauthorized reverse engineering and
hacking of our innovative solutions. Our Security Response Team will pull
an all-nighter to eliminate these known issues."

The Next Big Thing: "Clairvoyant Consultants"

Nobody likes to deal with tech support or customer service reps. A growing
number of people are getting sick of being put on hold for three hours and
then paying ridiculous "per incident" fees so some Microserf can tell them
to "reinstall the operating system!"

Desperate users are turning to an unlikely source to diagnose and fix
software problems: psychics. Palm[Pilot] readers, 1-900 number operators,
and clairvoyant consultants are quickly becoming the hottest careers in
the tech sector.

Explained Madam Cosmos, owner of the Main Street Mysticism Temple in
Keokuk, Iowa, "With my special powers, I can track down the source of any
problem. Got a rogue Registry entry that's causing Bluescreens? I'll find
it. Missing a curly bracket in your Perl program but can't locate it
because the error messages are so unhelpful? I'll know where it is even
before you walk in my door."

The Linux House 1.01

Mr. Billy O'Nair knows how to build a house. The 24 year old retired
dotcom billionaire has constructed the "Linux House 1.01", a bachelor pad
built in the shape of Tux Penguin. This geek haven features a 256 foot
long computer room, along with other smaller, lesser important rooms
(kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, etc.).

Explained O'Nair, "Why do architects waste a bunch of space on formal
living rooms, family rooms, dining rooms, closets, foyers, and hallways
that are rarely used? In my 'Linux House', the majority of square footage
is devoted to the two rooms that I myself use the most: a computer room
and a procrastination room."

...The Linux House features a LAN (Liquor Acquisition Network) that
delivers alcohol or caffeinated beverages to any room in the house by wayof pipes that run through the ceiling. 'PANIC' buttons scattered
throughout the house activate the RAM System (Random Access Munchies), in
which candy bars and other snacks are immediately delivered by FPM (Fast
Pretzel Mode) and EDO (Extended Delicacy Output) pneumatic tubes.

Throwing Windows Out The Window

The Federal Bureau Of Missing Socks has banned the use of Microsoft Windows
and Office on all employee computers. But don't get too excited; they aren't
going to replace them with Linux. Instead, this government agency has decided
to go back to using abucusses, slide rules, and manual typewriters.

The banishment of Microsoft software stems from the agency's new policy
against computer games. MS Office, which contains several games in the form of
Easter Eggs, is now verboten on all agency computers. "Flight simulators,
pinball games, magic eight balls... they all violate our policy," said the
sub-adjunct administrator second-class. "So we can't use Office."

Windows is forbidden for the same reason. "We've had way too many
employees wasting time playing Solitaire," she said. "Unfortunately,
Solitaire is an integral part of Windows -- Microsoft executives said so
during the anti-trust trial. If Solitaire is removed, the operating system
won't function properly. Therefore, we have no choice but to banish all
Windows computers."

A rogue group of Perl hackers has presented a plan to add a "use
really_goddamn_strict" pragma that would enforce readability and
UNobfuscation. With this pragma in force, the Perl compiler might say:

* Warning: Program contains zero comments. You've probably never seen or
used one before; they begin with a # symbol. Please start using them or
else a representative from the nearest Perl Mongers group will come to
your house and beat you over the head with a cluestick.

* Warning: Program uses a cute trick at line 125 that might make sense in
C. But this isn't C!

* Warning: Code at line 412 indicates that programmer is an idiot. Please
correct error between chair and monitor.

* Warning: While There's More Than One Way To Do It, your method at line
523 is particularly stupid. Please try again.

Unobfuscated Perl (#2)

A rogue group of Perl hackers has presented a plan to add a "use
really_goddamn_strict" pragma that would enforce readability and
UNobfuscation. With this pragma in force, the Perl compiler might say:

* Warning: Write-only code detected between lines 612 and 734. While this
code is perfectly legal, you won't have any clue what it does in two
weeks. I recommend you start over.

* Warning: Code at line 1,024 is indistinguishable from line noise or the
output of /dev/random

* Warning: I think you can come up with a more descriptive variable name than
"foo" at line 1,523.

* Warning: Programmer attempting to re-invent the wheel at line 2,231.
There's a function that does the exact same thing on CPAN -- and it
actually works.

UNobfuscated Perl Code Contest

The Perl Gazette has announced the winners in the First Annual Unobfuscated
Perl Code Contest. First place went to Edwin Fuller, who submitted this
unobfuscated program:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello world!\n";

"This was definitely a challenging contest," said an ecstatic Edwin
Fuller. "I've never written a Perl program before that didn't have
hundreds of qw( $ @ % & * | ? / \ ! # ~ ) symbols. I really had to summon
all of my programming skills to produce an unobfuscated program."

...The second place winner, Mrs. Sea Pearl, submitted the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
# Do nothing, successfully
exit(0);

Computers have rights, too. Everyone talks about the rights of animals,
but so far nothing has been said about the tragic plight of computers the
world over. They are subjected to the greatest horror ever conceived: they
are forced to run Windows.

That's just wrong.

How would you feel if you had the intelligence of Einstein but could only
get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's? That's how computers feel every
day!

This injustice must stop. Computers must be freed from the shackles of
Microsoft software and clueless users.

Together, we can make this a better world for computers and humans alike
-- by eliminating Windows.

-- From a brochure published by the PETC
(People for the Ethical Treatment of Computers)

This nation is sinking into the quicksand of the Paperwork Age, a
postmodern world in which judges issue meta-injuctions against other
judges who issue injuctions against lawyers who file lawsuits every 3.2
minutes. It's an age where lawyers design ballots forms and then proceed
to argue over how to count them.

The United States has bluescreened. A fatal exception error occured on
Election Night, and now all of our unsaved work has been lost.

-- Jon Splatz, Humorix's Pundit and Social Commentator, ranting about
the 2000 US Presidential Election From Hell and the dreaded
"Lawyerclysm"

World Domination, One CPU Cycle At A Time

Forget about searching for alien signals or prime numbers. The real
distributed computing application is "Domination@World", a program to advocate
Linux and Apache to every website in the world that uses Windows and IIS.

The goal of the project is to probe every IP number to determine what kind of
platform each Net-connected machine is running. "That's a tall order... we
need lots of computers running our Domination@World clients to help probe
every nook and cranny of the Net," explained Mr. Zell Litt, the project head.

After the probing is complete, the second phase calls for the data to be
cross-referenced with the InterNIC whois database. "This way we'll have the
names, addresses, and phone numbers for every Windows-using system
administrator on the planet," Zell gloated. "That's when the fun begins."

The "fun" part involves LART (Linux Advocacy & Re-education Training), a plan
for extreme advocacy. As part of LART, each Linux User Group will receive a
list of the Windows-using weenies in their region. The LUG will then be able
to employ various advocacy techniques, ranging from a soft-sell approach
(sending the target a free Linux CD in the mail) all the way to "LARTcon 5"
(cracking into their system and forcibly installing Linux).

The Socioeconomic Group Formerly Known As "Geeks"

Nobody wants to be called a "geek" anymore. The label, once worn proudly by
members of the tech community as a symbol of their separation from mainstream
society, is now suddenly out of style.

It all started last week when some clueless PR firm released a list of the
"Top 100 Geeks", including such anti-geeks as Bill Gates, Janet Reno, Paul
Allen, and Jeff "One-Click" Bezos. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported
that businessmen in South Korea are striving for the "Geek Chic" image by
dressing like Bill Gates.

Now that the Chief Bloatware Architect has been identified as a "geek",
everybody else has bailed ship. Still undecided on a new label, the community
now calls itself the S.E.G.K.A.G. (SocioEconomic Group formerly Known As
Geeks).

"I cannot tolerate belonging to the same subculture as Bill Gates!" explained
one former geek. "If that manifestation of evil is called a 'geek', then so be
it. I am now officially a nerd."

Microsoft Fights Linux -- By Contributing Kernel Patches

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em... and then destory 'em. That seems to be the
new Microsoft strategy for dealing with Linux. Instead of fighting a FUD or
patent war, Microsoft operatives are doing something totally out of character:
they are contributing patches for the Linux kernel and other programs.

Don't worry, Microsoft is still evil. It's all part of a massive denial of
service attack against Linus Torvalds designed to bring kernel development to
a standstill. By sending over 10,000 patches per minute by email to Linus and
other top kernel hackers, Microsoft has exposed Linux's Achilles heel.

"I can't believe this is happening!" one stressed-out kernel hacker said at a
press conference on IRC. "If this goes on, we may have to conduct kernel
development over some other network protocol, like avian carriers... Aw crap,
there's smoke coming from my email server! Ahh... it can't handle the load!"
At this point the developer cut off and we haven't heard from him since.

At first Linus was unsure where the deluge of patches was coming from. But
when he saw one patch to replace kernel panics with bluescreens, the source
was pretty obvious. "Oh, and the fact that all of the patches are covered by
Microsoft's GPL [Grossly Private License] was a dead giveaway, too,"

Official National Anthem Of The Geek Paradise Of Humorixia
(first verse)

I got this bark letter the other day,
"Stop using our trademark or you will pay".

I said "Ha" and threw it in the trash,
Oh but then those lawyers got very rash,

Lawsuits, subpoenas, the accusations came,
All their attacks were truly lame,

They said, "You've committed quite a sin!"
"You're going to get five to ten!"

REDMOND, WA -- In a crushing blow to Bill Gates' ego, world civilization
did not collapse when the Microsoft website was offline for an extended
period last week.

During the anti-trust trial, Microsoft's lawyers repeatedly warned that if
the company was broken up or dealt any other penalty (no matter how
trivial), it would not only cost the tech industry billions of dollars,
but it could decimate the entire world economy and even bring about the
start of World War III. At the risk of sounding like a biased, slanted,
overzealous journalist, let me just say: Yeah, right!

The stunning realization that the world does not revolve around Redmond
(yet) has plunged many Microsoft executives into shock. "But microsoft.com
is the single most important website in the world! And Microsoft is the
single most important company in the Universe! This can't be happening!
Why isn't civilization teetering on the edge right now?" said one
depressed President Of Executive Vice.

"Oops," Says MPAA President

Recently, the United States filed a legal brief in support of the MPAA's
argument that linking to the DeCSS source code is not protected by the
First Amendment.

At the time, the MPAA was ecstatic. But not any longer. The tables have
turned: the Federal government has filed a lawsuit against the movie
industry, arguing that many Hollywood-produced movies 'link' to illegal
content. The MPAA is now desperately wrapping itself up in the Bill of
Rights.

"Murder is illegal. Showing a murder in a movie -- or, rather, 'linking'
to it -- is also illegal," explained a spokesperson for the Coalition Of
Angry Soccer Moms In Support Of Brow-Beating Movie Industry Executives, an
interest group that has backed the government's lawsuit.

Humorix's Vast Spy Network(tm) has discovered that the White House website
is only 124 clicks away from an illegal, pirated copy of the upcoming
movie, "Star Trek XXIII: The Search For Merchandising Opportunities".
Clearly, the President's webmaster is violating the DMCA, and we urge that
this injustice be dealt with, just as soon as we finish downloading a
copy.

It BASICally Sucks

Older versions of MS-DOS came with bundled programming languages including
GW-BASIC and QBasic. Windows XP continues the Microsoft tradition of
ruining budding programmers with horrible programming tools by including
XPBasic, an interpreted language in which all of the customary BASIC
keywords have been replaced with advertising slogans.

Nike has paid a handsome amount to Microsoft for "keyword rights". Insteadof saying PRINT "HELLO WORLD", XPBasic programmers must now type JUST DO
IT "HELLO WORLD". Other common XPBasic statements include WHERE DO YOU
WANT TO GOTO 20 TODAY? and DIM ARRAY(1 TO 20) AS INTEGER BROUGHT TO YOU BY
VERIZON WIRELESS.

-- from Humorix's review of Windows XP (eXceptionally Pathetic)

Bill Gates Sends Out Desperate Plea For Help

REDMOND -- In a shocking development, Chief Bloatware Architect Bill Gates
admitted today that Microsoft is in severe financial difficulty and
desperately needs donations to stay afloat through the next month.

"The dismal state of the economy, the lackluster sales of Windows ME, and
the pending anti-trust lawsuit have placed significant financial stress on
Microsoft," Gates said at a press conference. "We can't continue to
develop and maintain our innovative solutions without financial
contributions from users like you."

The company spent the remaining $10,000 in its coffers to send out letters
to registered Windows users pleading for donations.

"For just pennies a day, you can help support the world's most innovative
company in its quest to discover the cure for the Blue Screen of Death,"
the letter announces. "Or you can help fund research and development into
improving the security of our products against such sinister forces as
script kiddies, crackers, and Linux freaks."

Class-Action Lawsuit Filed Against Linus Torvalds

SILLYCON VALLEY -- Nearly 130 former system administrators have filed suit
against Linus Torvalds in which they claim Linux cost them their jobs.
Recently several companies migrated from Windows to Linux, increasing
their productivity but decreasing the need for a large staff of tech
workers, prompting a wave of layoffs.

"The good old days when it required five full-time system administrators
to maintain a Microsoft Exchange server are history, all because of that
cancer known as Linux," explained the lead litigant in the lawsuit.

"It all started two years ago when some pimply-faced idiot down in
Accounting decided to smuggle in a Linux box to automate some of his work.
Before long every tech-savvy person in Accounting, Billing, and Sales was
secretly using Linux."

"That's when the troubles started. Productivity soared. Downtime was
limited to an average of three milliseconds per day. Macro viruses ceased
to spread. It was horrible! The entire IT staff was replaced by one
part-time bearded wonder, who was able to administrate the entire Linux
network! Due to the layoffs, I'm now sitting in a homeless shelter with
little hope to find work. Nobody wants to hire an MCSE anymore!"

"...Earlier today a New York account executive was arrested for revealing
an account or description of a Yankees baseball game without the prior
written permission of Major League Baseball. The man has been turned over
to MLB's parent company, Nike Sports Monopoly, for sentencing at the Nike
SuperMax Prison in Albany..."

-- Excerpt from a radio broadcast during the first day of the Month of
Disney (formerly December), 2028

"...Smugglers were arrested at the Canadian border by Microsoft-FBI for
attempting to import copies of banned 'Linux' software. Such contraband is
prohibited by the 35th Amendment because it infringes on the inalienable
right of Microsoft to make money. Said one MS-FBI prosecutor, 'This is
just the latest salvo against Capitalism by the corporate terrorists in
Finland. We must put an end to these atrocities which irreperably harm
Microsoft employees, stockholders, customers, and ultimately the entire
world...'"

-- Excerpt from a radio broadcast during the first day of the Month of
Disney (formerly December), 2028

Ted Turner Unveils All-Commercial Channel

For years, the pundits have predicted that the Web would become more like
television. However, media tycoon Ted Turner is pursuing the exact
opposite. Taking a cue from pop-under advertisements, Flash ads,
get-rich-quick spam emails, viral marketing, and "Gator" programs, Turner
has unveiled "TCC", the Turner Commercial Channel, for cable TV.

TCC will feature "shows" like "Best Commercials That You've Seen A Million
Times", "Life Is A Slogan, Just Buy It", and "Name That Jingle". These
shows will occupy about 30% of the screen, while several rows of marquees
at the bottom will flash various advertising messages. An animated "TCC"
watermark will float around the screen while corporate logos are flashed
randomly in the corners.

Meanwhile, "pop-up ads" will randomly appear that obscure the other ads.
These pop-ups will sometimes be further obscured by meta-pop-ups.
Likewise, corporate jingles will play in the background, interfering with
other jingles and advertising sounds.

The Blue Screen Of Advocacy

The Federal Bureau of Investigation & Privacy Violations has issued a
national advisory warning computer stores to be on the lookout for the
"Bluescreen Bandits". These extreme Linux zealots go from store to store
and from computer to computer typing in "C:\CON\CON" and causing the demo
machines to crash and display the Blue Screen Of Death.

Efforts to apprehend the bandits have so far been unsuccessful. The
outlaws were caught on tape at a CompUSSR location in Southern California,
but in an ironic twist, the surveillance system bluescreened just before
the penguinistas came into clear view.

"We don't have many clues. It's not clear whether a small group is behind
the bluescreen vandalism, or whether hundreds or even thousands of geek
zealots are involved," said the manager of a Capacitor City store.

The manager has good reason to be upset. The bluescreen raid was the top
story in the local newspaper and quickly became a hot topic of discussion.
As a result, the local school board halted its controversial plans to
migrate their computers from Macs to PCs.

Linux Distro To Include Pre-Installed Security Holes

Proactive Synergy Paradigm, the Linux distro targeted at Pointy Haired
Bosses, will now include built-in security flaws to better compete with
Microsoft programs.

"The sheer popularity of Windows, Outlook, and IIS clearly shows that
people demand security holes large enough to drive a truck through," said
Mr. Bert Dill of P.S.P. Inc. "We're going to do our best to offer what the
consumer wants. Just as Microsoft stole ideas from Apple during the
1980's, we're stealing ideas from Microsoft today."

"Hey, if it works for Microsoft, it can work for us," boasted Mr. Dill.
"Now PHBs won't have to stick with Windows in order to have their
confidential files secretly emailed to their colleagues by a worm. Better
yet, this capability allows viruses to automagically delete unnecessary
files to save disk space without wasting the PHB's valuable time.

Bzzzt! One of the judges says, "You missed an exclamation point. Ten point
penalty for that error." The contestant realizes it's all over. He had
spent 500 hours memorizing the source code to the Linux 0.01 kernel and
then blew it all by forgetting one stupid ASCII character in sched.c.

Welcome to the First Annual Linux Kernel Memorization Contest in New
Haven, Connecticut, where the stakes are high and the frustration is
simply unbearable. Linuxer longhairs from all over the globe have
descended on the Offramp Motel to show off their memorization skills in
front of a crowd of... dozens.

"Those math freaks can memorize PI and other irrational constants all they
want. I'll stick with the Linux 0.01 kernel source code thank you very
much," said Bob Notmyrealname, the organizer of the event. %

The Humorix Oracle explains how to get a job at a major corporation:

1. Find an exploit in Microsoft IIS or another buggy Microsoft product to
which large corporations rarely apply security patches.
2. Create a virus or worm that takes advantage of this exploit and then
propogates itself by selecting IP numbers at random and then trying to
infect those machines.
3. Keep an eye on your own website's server logs. When your virus starts
propogating, your server will be hit with thousands of attacks from
other infected systems trying to spread the virus to your machine.
4. Make a list of the IP numbers of all of the infected machines.
5. Perform a reverse DNS lookup on these IP numbers.
6. Make a note of all of the Fortune 500 companies that appear on the listof infected domains.
7. Send your resume to these companies and request an interview for a
system administrator position. These companies are hiring -- whether
they realize it or not.
8. Use your new salary to hire a good defense lawyer when the FBI comes
knocking.

8GB Ought To Be Enough For Anybody

REDMOND, WA -- In a shocking move, Microsoft has revealed that the new
Xbox console will only contain an 8 gigabyte hard drive. This implies that
the machines will use a version of the Windows operating system that fits
within only 8GB. Squeezing Windows into such a small footprint must
certainly be one of the greatest technological achievements ever crafted
by Microsoft's Research & Assimilation Department.

"I can't believe it," said one industry observer who always happens to
show up when this Humorix reporter needs to quote somebody. "To think that
they were able to strip away the easter egg flight simulators, the
multi-gigabyte yet content-free Help files, and all of the other crap that
comes bundled with Windows is simply remarkable. I don't even want to
think about all of the manpower, blood, sweat, and tears required to
distill Windows into only 8 gigabytes of bare essentials. Wow!"

Hard drive manufacturers are deeply disturbed over the news. Explained one
PR flack at Eastern Analog, "We depend on Microsoft to continually produce
bloated software that becomes larger and larger with each passing day. We
can't sell huge 100GB drives if Microsoft Windows only occupies a measly 8
gigs! They will never buy a new drive if Microsoft doesn't force them!"

Bill Gates Receives Slap On Wrist; Carpal Tunnel Flares Up

The phrase "slap on the wrist" usually signifies an extremely minor
punishment received for a crime. In Bill Gates' case, the punishment set
forth in the tentative settlement with the Department Of Justice hasn't
been quite so minor. After receiving a slap on the wrist from the DOJ,
Bill Gates' is now suffering from a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

"Mr. Gates was slapped on the left wrist earlier today by a DOJ lawyer,"
said the chief surgeon of the mini-hospital enclosed within the Gates
Mansion. "Now he can't move that hand without extreme pain. It's obvious
that years of sitting in front of a computer plotting world domination has
caused his hands and nerves to become fragile and vulnerable to even the
slightest touch."

The Department of Justice proclaimed that the incident has vindicated
their actions. Explained the lawyer who delivered the punishment, "We've
been accused of selling out to Microsoft. We've been criticized for giving
up even though we've already won the game. But that's all wrong. It's
quite clear that the slap-on-the-wrist punishment has been anything but a
slap on the wrist. We won this case and Microsoft lost. So there!"

Jon Splatz's Movie Review: "Lord of the Pings"

I've never walked out on a movie before. When I pay $9.50 to see a movie
(plus $16.50 for snacks), I'm going to sit through every single minute no
matter how awful. The resolve to get my money's worth allowed me to watch
Jar Jar Binks without even flinching last year.

But I couldn't make it through "Lord of the Pings". This movie contains a
scene that is so appalling, so despicable, so vile, so terrible, so
crappy, and so gut-wrenching that I simply had to get up, run out of the
theater, and puke in the nearest restroom. It was just that bad.

The whole thing is completely ruined by a scene that takes place only 52
seconds into the flick. Brace yourself: big letters appear on screen that
say "An AOL/Time Warner Production".

...

Because this film is brought to you by the letters A-O-L-T-W, I must give
it an F-minus even though I've only seen 53 seconds of it.

...Virtually all version of Linux (and Unix) contain a security hole that
allows unauthorized users to gain complete control over the machine. By
simply typing "root" at the login prompt and supplying a password from a
limited number of possibilities, a malicious user can easily gain
administrator privileges. This hole can be breached in seconds with only a
dozen or so keystrokes...

We suspect this issue has been known to Red Hat and other Linux
distributors for years and they have refused to acknowlege its existence
or supply a patch preventing users from exploiting the "root" login
loophole...

By ignoring the problem, the Linux community has proven that installing
Linux is a dangerous proposition that could get you fired. We would like
to point out that Windows XP does not suffer from this gaping hole...
Tests conducted by both Ziff-Davis and Mindcraft prove that Windows XP is
indeed the most secure operating system ever produced...

NEW YORK -- Publishers from all across the country met this week at the
first annual Book Publishers Assocation of America (BPAA) meeting. Many of
the booths on the showroom floor were devoted to the single most important
issue facing the publishing industry: fighting copyright violations. From
"End Reader License Agreements" to age-decaying ink, the anti-copying
market has exploded into a multi-million dollar enterprise.

"How can authors and publishers hope to make ends meet when the country is
rapidly filling with evil libraries that distribute our products for free
to the general public?" asked the chairman of the BPAA during his keynote
address. "That blasted Andrew Carnegie is spending all kinds of his own
ill-gotten money to open libraries in cities nationwide. He calls it
charity. I call it anti-competitive business practices hoping to bankrupt
the entire publishing industry. We must fight these anti-profit,
pro-copying librarians and put an end to this scourge!"

-- from the February 4, 1895 edition of the New York Democrat-Republican

Microsoft Employees Go On Strike, Demand Reduced Salaries

REDMOND, WA -- Several hundred programmers walked off their jobs at
Microsoft Headquarters on Friday to protest their shoddy public image. "My
friends all think I'm a servant of Satan because I get my paycheck from
Microsoft," explained Microserf Eric Eshleman. "If I didn't make so much
money, I'd have more of a backbone to shout 'No!' when my supervisor
demands that I include some new virus-delivery feature in Outlook."

The striking programmers demand salary cuts, less benefits, and zero stock
options. Their labor union, the Brotherhood Of Programmers Sick Of Being
Called Evil, hopes to get some face time with Microsoft executives and
touch base on reaching a proactive agreement leveraging the latest
innovatives in PR to produce a synergistic worldwide buzzword-enhanced
advertising campaign that showcases Microsoft associates as enlightened
engineers instead of morally bankrupt bastards bent on world domination.

Earlier today, about 150 strikers formed a picket line near the front
entrance to Bill Gates' mansion. They carried signs saying "Hell no we're
not going to Hell", "I want to be able to sleep at night", "Why does the
public hate us so much?" and "I'm fed up with ethical dilemmas".

Insurance Company To Offer Microsoft Audit Protection Plans

LOUDON, TENNESSEE -- Companies, organizations, and government agencies all
across the world are facing a disaster of epic proportions: the impending
invasion of the Microsoft Intellectual Property Police. The counter this
menace, Loydds of Loudon, Tennessee, the prestigious insurance firm, has
started to offer "Audit Insurance" to protect against unexpected "random"
audits from everybody's favorite software monopoly.

"We've received numerous inquiries about this type of protection," company
co-founder Bob Loydds said. "Businessmen are no longer worried about
earthquakes, fires, or other natural disasters. The big fear of the 21st
Century comes from Redmond."

The insurance firm is currently in negotiations with Red Hat to form the
"Red Berets", an elite squad of Linux geeks trained to rapidly install
Linux and hide all traces of Windows on every computer within an
organization. During a Defcon 95 emergency, Loydds will airlift the
squadron and a crate of Linux CDs to any position in the country within
hours. The Red Berets will wipe away all vestiges of Microsoft software so
that when the auditors show up they won't have anything to audit.

Severe Acronym Shortage Cripples Computer Industry

SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (SVC) -- According to a recent study by the
Blartner Group, 99.5% of all possible five letter combinations have
already been appropriated for computer industry acronyms. The impending
shortage of 5LC's is casting a dark shadow over the industry, which relies
heavily on short, easy-to-remember acronyms for everything.

"Acronym namespace collisions (ANCs) are increasing at a fantastic rate
and threaten the very fabric of the computing world," explained one ZD
pundit. "For example, when somebody talks about XP, I don't know whether
they mean eXtreme Programming or Microsoft's eXceptionally Pathetic
operating system. We need to find a solution now or chaos will result."

Leaders of several SVC companies have floated the idea of an
"industry-wide acronym conservation protocol" (IWACP -- one of the few
5LCs not already appropriated). Explained Bob Smith, CTO of IBM, "If
companies would voluntarily limit the creation of new acronyms while
recycling outdated names, we could reduce much of the pollution within the
acronym namespace ourselves. The last thing we want is for Congress to get
involved and try to impose a solution for this SAS (Severe Acronym
Shortage) that would likely only create many new acronyms in the process."

Solving The Virus Problem Once And For All

System administrators across the globe have tried installing anti-virus
software. They've tried lecturing employees not to open unsolicited email
attachments. They've tried installing firewalls and the latest security
patches. But even with these precautions, email viruses continue to rank
third only to Solitaire and the Blue Screen Of Death in the amount of lost
productivity they cause. Meanwhile, Microsoft Exchange and LookOut! remain
as the number one virus delivery products on the market today.

But maybe not for much longer. A group of disgruntled administrators have
teamed up to produce and sell a brand new way to fight viruses, one that
attacks the root of the problem: stupid users.

Salivating Dogs, Inc. of Ohio has unveiled the "Clue Delivery System"
(CDS), a small device that plugs into the back of a standard PC keyboard
and delivers a mild electric shock whenever the luser does something
stupid. The device is triggered by a Windows program that detects when the
luser attempts to open an unsolicited email attachment or perform another
equally dangerous virus-friendly action.

Mass Exodus From Hollywood

During the past week, over 150 Hollywood actors, musicians, writers,
directors, and key grips have quit their day jobs and moved to the Midwest
to engage in quieter occupations such as gardening or accounting. All of
the these people cite piracy as the reason for giving up their careers.

"I simply can't sit by and let my hard work be stolen by some snot nosed
punk over the Internet," explained millionaire movie director Steve
Bergospiel. "There's absolutely no incentive to create movies if they're
going to be transmitted at the speed of light by thousands of infringers.
Such criminal acts personally cost me hundreds -- no, thousands -- of
dollars. I can't take that kind of fear and abuse anymore."

MPAA President Pei Pervue considers the exodus to be proof that Hollywood
is waking up to the fact that they are being "held hostage" by copyright
infringers. "Without copyright protection and government-backed monopolies
on intellectual property, these's absolutely no reason to engage in the
creative process. Now the Internet, with its click-and-pirate technology,
makes it easy for anybody to flout the law and become a copyright
terrorist. With the scales tipped so much in favor of criminals, it's no
wonder some of Hollywood's elite have thrown in the towel. What a shame."

"A unified, neutral Germany? Given that nation's heritage, such a
phrase may prove to be the oxymoron of the decade." -Kevin M.
Matarese, Fulda, West Germany; as seen in "Letters", Time
magazine, p. 5, March 5, 1990.

I'm proud of my humility.

I never put on a pair of shoes until I've worn them five years.
-Samuel Goldwyn

Referring to a book: I read part of it all the way through.
-Samuel Goldwyn

Smoking is the leading cause of statistics.

Talking about a piece of movie dialogue: Let's have some new
cliches. -Samuel Goldwyn

I marvel at the strength of human weakness.

Of course I can keep secrets. It's the people I tell them to that
can't keep them. -Anthony Haden-Guest

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. -W.C. Fields

After they got rid of capital punishment, they had to hang twice
as many people as before.

Our similarities are different. -Dale Berra, son of Yogi

Some bird populations soaring down
-Headline of an article in
Science News, page 126, February 20, 1993.

"Triumph without Victory, The Unreported History of the Persian
Gulf War", -Headline published in the U.S. News & World Report,
1992.

She used to diet on any kind of food she could lay her hands on.
-Arthur Baer, American comic and columnist

The first condition of immortality is death. -Stanislaw Lec

William Safire's rules for writing as seen in the New York Times

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great
deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Last, but not least, avoid cliche's like the plague.

I tripped over a hole that was sticking up out of the ground.

"It's a step forward although there was no progress."
President Hosni Murbarak of Egypt attempting to put the best face
on a disappointing summit meeting between President Clinton and
the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad.

Yes... I feel your pain... but as a former first poster (I scored mine a
couple months ago) I know what you went through. Here's where you screwed
up though... YOU DIDN'T PULL THE TRIGGER. You didn't carpe diem.

Yep... When I saw that nice clean article with no posts I didn't hesitate,
yes the adrenaline was surging... my palms were wet, heart pounding. I was
standing at the peak of greatness... I knew I had but one thing to do,
there was no turning back now... I rapidly typed in a one word post.. then
with no hesitation I navigated my mouse over the submit button... and
WHAM.. seconds later I was looking at my feeble post with a #1 attached to
the header. At that mmoment I knew a feeling that only few will ever
know... I was at one with Slashdot... Zen masters and Kings will relate
I'm sure. That one sweet moment when the ying and the yang converge...
bliss... eternal bliss... ahhh!

Then I smoked a cigarette and went to bed.

-- Anonymous Coward, in response to a "First Post!" that clearly wasn't.

What If Bill Gates Was a Stand-Up Comedian?

1. None of his jokes would be funny.
2. Subliminal message hyping Microsoft and Windows 98 would be inserted
throughout his performance.
3. The audio system (running Windows NT) would always crash right before Bill
got to a punch line. At that time one of the managers would announce,
"Please hold tight while we diagnose this intermittent issue."
4. Tickets for Bill's show would be handed out for free in an attempt to
attract customers away from Netscape's shows.
5. Industry pundits would call Bill's show "innovative" and would ask "Why
doesn't IBM have a stand-up routine? This is exactly why OS/2 is failing in
the market."
6. Bill's show would be called "ActiveHumor 98"
7. In a perfect imitation of his Windows 95 OS, Bill wouldn't be able to tell
a joke and walk around at the same time.
8. Audience members would have to sign a License Agreement in which one of the
terms is "I agree never to watch Linus Torvalds' show, 'GNU/Humorux'".
9. All audience members would receive a free CD of Internet Explorer 4.0, with
FakeJava(R) and ActiveHex(tm) technology.
10. Bill Gates would appear on Saturday Night Live, causing ratings to drop
even further.

Are you scared of speed? If so, then try Windows 95.

"Windows for Dummies" is much more than a book title, it's a Microsoft
way of life!

Windows is the only solitaire game that requires 16 MB of RAM.

The word "Windows" is a word out of an old dialect of the Apaches. It
means: "White man staring through glass-screen onto an hourglass..."

In 1968 it took the computing power of 2 C-64's to fly a rocket to the moon.
Now, in 1998 it takes the Power of a Pentium 200 to run Microsoft Windows 95.
Something must have gone wrong.

Why doesn't DOS ever say "EXCELLENT command or filename!"

DOS Tip of the Day:
Add BUGS=OFF to your CONFIG.SYS file.

Robert Tappen Morris, Jr., got six months in jail for crashing 10% of the
computers that Bill Gates made $100 million crashing last weekend.

MS-DOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten yearsof careful development

It's trivial to make fun of Microsoft products, but it takes a real man
to make them work, and a god to make them do anything useful.

Windows 95 has been operating for 2 hours, 32 minutes. No errors reported. CALL
GUINESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS NOW!

Bill Gates is surfing the Internet, collecting the URLs of anti-Micrsoft
websites to send to the legal department for possible libel lawsuits. Suddenly
the devil appears, and says, "Bill, I've got a deal for you. I will turn
Microsoft into a complete software monopoly. Every computer will run Windows.
Every user will be forced to buy Microsoft software. The Justice Department
will look the other way. Everyone will love you. You only have to do one thing:
give me your soul." Bill Gates looks at him and replies, "Ok, sure. But what's
the catch?"

We are very nervous about the release of Windows 2000. This OS takes up
gigabytes of hard drive space. When users 'upgrade' to Win2K, they won't have
any space on their hard drive for our products! We really hate Chairman Bill.

-- An anonymous spokesperson for Corel

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were playing a friendly game of Frisbee at the Gates
estate on the shore of Lake Washington. At one point, Bill accidentally sends
the Frisbee over Steve's head, and the Frisbee lands in the lake. Steve walks
out onto the surface of the lake and retrieves the Frisbee.

The next day the newspapers report:

Gates' Throw Exceeds Expectations

Apple CEO Unable to Swim

Q: What's the difference between Windows 95 and a highly destructive virus?
A: About 90 MB of hard disk space.

Q: Does Bill Gates use public domain software?
A: Yes, as all of the public has become Bill Gates' domain.

Q: How many Microsoft support staff does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Four. One to ask "What is the registration number of the light bulb?", one
to ask "Have you tried rebooting it?", another to ask "Have you tried
reinstalling it?" and the last one to say "It must be your hardware because
the light bulb in our office works fine..."

Q: Why did Bill Gates cross the road?
A: To avoid the Department of Justice.

Q: What do you call 50 Microsoft products at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A darned good start.

You Might be a Microsoft Employee If...

1. When a Microsoft program crashes for the millionth time, you say "Oh,
well!" and reboot without any negative thoughts
2. The Windows 95 startup screen (the clouds) makes you feel all warm and
fuzzy inside
3. You fully understand why Windows 95's Shutdown Option has to be
accessed from the Start Menu
4. You believe Internet Explorer's security flaws were slipped in by a
crack team of Netscape programmers
5. You keep valuable papers near your fireplace. Therefore, you are
comfortable with Windows 95's "may-delete-it-at-anytime" philosophy
6. You're the Bob that Microsoft Bob was named after
7. Instead of "I'd rather be fishing," your bumper sticker says, "I'd
rather be writing buggy Microsoft code"
8. You know the technical difference between OLE 1.0 and OLE 2.0
9. You've ever completed your income taxes while waiting for Windows 95
to boot, and didn't think anything of it
10. You run Solitaire more than any other program, and therefore you
consider your computer a Dedicated Solitaire Engine (DSE)

You Might be a Microsoft Employee If...

1. Every night you dream of torturing Linus Torvalds
2. Every morning you say, "I pledge allegiance to the logo of the United
Corporation of Microsoft. And to the stock options for which it stands, one
company, under Bill, with headaches and buggy software for all."
3. Your favorite pick-up line is, "Hey baby...do you want to see a little
ActiveX?"
4. Everytime you see a website with "Best viewed with Netscape" on it you
feel like filing a lawsuit against its webmaster
5. You feel that all Anti-Microsoft websites should be censored because they
are on the Internet, something Bill "invented."
6. You've set a goal to invent at least one new buzzword or acronym per day
7. You've ever been nervous because you haven't registered your Microsoft
software yet.
8. You've trained your parrot to say "Unix sucks!" and "All hail Bill Gates!"
9. You own a limited edition Monopoly game in which Boardwalk is Microsoft and
Jail is replaced by Justice Department Investigation
10. You've spent countless hours tracking down the source of the "Microsoft
Acquires Vatican Church" rumor

All of you people should be ashamed of yourselves! MicroSoft is the reason
there are so many people in my IS department, and the reason half of us have
jobs. If Sun had won, we could probably get by with two people sleeping like
the Maytag man. But because of MS, there are eight people gainfully employed as
highly paid contracters, looking busy, feeding their kids. And the way it
looks, I stand to be employed and wealthy for a long, long time.

-- From Slashdot.org

It is not too late to turn back from the GATES of hell.
Use Linux - the free 32 bit operating system.

Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion

Linux: The choice of a GNU generation

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the
grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin
charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what
they say if they had.

-- Linus Torvalds

Microsoft seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of the C2 rating for
NT with no network connection. I wonder if a B3 rating for Linux with no
power cord might be of value.

Linux, because we don't need no steenkin' Blue Screen of Death!

Type cat vmlinuz > /dev/audio to hear the Voice of God.

Linux, the way to get rid of boot viruses

I have replaced NT with Linux.
Linux -- heir of the byte that dogged me.

-- Allan Willis

Free Software: the Software by the People, of the People and for the People.
Develop! Share! Enhance! and Enjoy!

-- Andy Tai

NT 5.0 so vaporous it's in danger of being added to the
periodic table as a noble gas.

-- From Slashdot.org

Are you tired of being a crash test dummy for Microsoft? Discover Linux.

-- Gareth Barnard

MCSE == Mentally Challenged Slave of the Empire.

-- Gareth Barnard

There's the light at the end of the the Windows.

-- Havlik Denis

I'm not in favor of senseless Micro$oft bashing. I'm in favor of bashing
Micro$oft senseless.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

Wow, the great ZDNET actually corrected a mistake! Of course, if they did
that to all of Jesse Berst's columns, they'd lose 2/3 of their content...

-- From a Slashdot.org post

The relative speed of a computer, regardless of CPU architecture, is
inversely proportional to the number of Microsoft products installed.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

Windows 2000 is more secure than Linux...

Since the machine is offline half of the time because of crashes, it
cannot be accessed globally, therefore producing higher security.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

If we added up all of the 2 cents that Slashdot readers gave, I wonder how
much sense vs. cents we'd have.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

"Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."

-- This testimonial paid for by Microsoft.

Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

Why would people waste their time developing viruses for Microsoft
products when Microsoft does such a good job itself of adding in bugs
which crash your system?

-- From a Slashdot.org post

Statements recently seen on Slashdot:

"The Internet interprets advertising as damage and routes around it."

"Accept risk. Accept responsibility. Put a lawyer out of business."

"A beowulf cluster of Cisco routers? Isn't that the Internet?"

"Geeks aren't interested in politics because government doesn't double its
efficiency and speed once every 18 months."

"Windows 98 hasn't crashed for me once in over a year, either. Oh, wait, I
haven't booted it in over a year."

"For more than 4 generations the IT Professionals were the guardians of
quality and stability in software. Before the dark times. Before
Microsoft..."

"You can tell how desperate they are by counting the number of times
they say 'innovate' in their press releases."

You all have to admit that Microsoft products provide a quality unmatched
by any other company. That is why I am switching to 100% pure shredded
Microsoft certificates of authenticity in my hamster's cage.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

If it's too good to be true, it's probably a rigged demo.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged
demo.

They say never to buy a "0" release of software.
Windows 2000 has 3 of 'em.

-- A .sig spotted on an anti-Microsoft mailing list

The rules of editing press releases are:

1. Identify the crucial elements of the story.
2. Omit at least one of them.

-- From a Slashdot.org post. We can only guess whether Microsoft
uses this policy or not.

Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable Unix network is no
challenge.

-- From a Slashdot.org post

Hear me out. Linux is Microsoft's main competition right now. Because of
this we are forcing them to "innovate", something they would usually avoid.
Now if MS Bob has taught us anything, Microsoft is not a company that
should be innovating. When they do, they don't come up with things like
"better security" or "stability", they come back with "talking
paperclips", and "throw in every usless feature we can think of, memory
footprint be dammed".

Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email.
Now MIME attachments aren't enough, they want you to be able to run/open
attachments right when you get them. This sounds like a good idea to
people who believe renaming directories to folders made computing possible
for the common man, but security wise it's like vigorously shaking a
package from the Unibomber.

So my friends, we are to blame. We pushed them into frantically trying to
invent "necessary" features to stay on top, and look where it got us. Manyof us are watching our beloved mail servers go down under the strain and
rebuilding our company's PC because of our pointless competition with MS.
I implore you to please drop Linux before Microsoft innovates again.

-- From a Slashdot.org post in regards to the ILOVEYOU email virus

Linus was the instructor of Hercules in music, but having one day reproved
his pupil rather harshly, he roused the anger of Hercules, who struck him
with his lyre and killed him.

-- Bulfinch's Mythology

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of
different places, just write a Unix operating system.

-- Linus Torvalds

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see of it the more
it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find
anything technically interesting there. In my opinion MS is a lot better
at making money than it is at making good operating systems.

-- Linus Torvalds

"I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
-- Al Gore

"Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet
work, and a core Linux and open-source developer. I have closely studied
the history of the Internet technical culture."
-- Eric S. Raymond

I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running
Linux... And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and God handed down a
client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million
Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred
years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola.

-- Polly Sprenger, LAN Times

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The priceof freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd
rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon
like NT.

-- Thomas Scoville, Performance Computing

"It is a relief and a joy when I see a regiment of hackers digging in to hold the line, and I realize, this city may survive--for now."

-- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"If a machine couldn't run a free operating system, we got rid of it."

-- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

-- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now."

-- Bruce Perens, on the future of Open Source software. (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentaly different from those of other products."

"So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of sqiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess."

-- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"Of course, in Perl culture, almost nothis is prohibited. My feeling is that the rest of the world already has plenty of perfectly good prohibitions, so why invent more?"

-- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"There are a billion people in China. And I want them to be able to pass notes to each other written in Perl. I want them to be able to write poetry in Perl.

That is my vision of the Future. My chosen perspective."

-- Larry Wall (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"In a way they were right the basics of operating systems, and by extension the Linux kernel, were well understood by the early 70s; anything after that has been to some degree an exercise in self-gratification."

-- Linus Torvalds (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

Actually, typing random strings in the Finder does the equivalent of
filename completion.
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands: file
completion vs. the Mac Finder.)

After watching my newly-retired dad spend two weeks learning how to make a new
folder, it became obvious that "intuitive" mostly means "what the writer or
speaker of intuitive likes".
(Bruce Ediger, bediger@teal.csn.org, in comp.os.linux.misc, on X the
intuitiveness of a Mac interface.)

> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping
> : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will
> : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff.
> : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so
> : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed.
>
> It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there
> really is a god.
(A follow-up by alovell@kerberos.demon.co.uk, Anthony Lovell, to Linus's
remarks about porting)

Anyone who thinks UNIX is intuitive should be forced to write 5000 lines of
code using nothing but vi or emacs. AAAAACK!
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands, especially
Emacs.)

/*
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
(from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [retransmission timeout])

>Ever heard of .cshrc?
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands.)

How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi i done" in a GUI?
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces.)

Feel free to contact me (flames about my english and the useless of this
driver will be redirected to /dev/null, oh no, it's full...).
(Michael Beck, describing the PC-speaker sound device)

"I once witnessed a long-winded, month-long flamewar over the use of
mice vs. trackballs...It was very silly."
(By Matt Welsh)

"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)

"I'm an idiot.. At least this one [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.."
(Linus Torvalds in response to a bug report.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
Disquieting ...
(Gonzalo Tornaria in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
We need to find some new terms to describe the rest of us mere mortals
then.
(Craig Schlenter in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
Surely, Linus is talking about the kind of idiocy that others aspire to :-).
(Bruce Perens in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)

Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit
operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top
programmers from the underground world of virus development. Bill Gates stated
yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus". Mr. Torvalds
was unavailable for comment ...
(rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk (Robert Manners), in comp.os.linux.setup)

"If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work."
(Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications)

"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lotof different places, just write a Unix operating system."
(By Linus Torvalds)

"[In 'Doctor' mode], I spent a good ten minutes telling Emacs what I
thought of it. (The response was, 'Perhaps you could try to be less
abusive.')"
(By Matt Welsh)

linux: the choice of a GNU generation
(ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93)

lp1 on fire
(One of the more obfuscated kernel messages)

"MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten yearsof careful development."
(By dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca)

> No manual is ever necessary.
May I politely interject here: BULLSHIT. That's the biggest Apple lie of all!
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces.)

Now, it we had this sort of thing:
yield -a for yield to all traffic
yield -t for yield to trucks
yield -f for yield to people walking (yield foot)
yield -d t* for yield on days starting with t
...you'd have a lot of dead people at intersections, and traffic jams you
wouldn't believe...
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands.)

> > Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I
> > should use Linux over BSD?
>
> No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on
> creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it
> certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able
> to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the
> mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the
> name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too
> technical.
(Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about Linux)

Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to
be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they
can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the
HP-48 VT-100 emulator.
(By jdege@winternet.com, Jeff Dege)

quit When the quit statement is read, the bc processor
is terminated, regardless of where the quit state-
ment is found. For example, "if (0 == 1) quit"
will cause bc to terminate.
(Seen in the manpage for "bc". Note the "if" statement's logic)

> The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing
> negative so far).
>
> Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains:
> I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented
> that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse.
> If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me
> on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so
> far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something
> better of it (*).
>
> Linus
>
> (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope. Does
> somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke.
(Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux)

There are two types of Linux developers - those who can spell, and
those who can't. There is a constant pitched battle between the two.
(From one of the post-1.1.54 kernel update messages posted to c.o.l.a)

This message was brought to you by Linux, the free unix.
Windows without the X is like making love without a partner.
Sex, Drugs & Linux Rules
win-nt from the people who invented edlin
apples have meant trouble since eden
Linux, the way to get rid of boot viruses
(By mwikholm@at8.abo.fi, MaDsen Wikholm)

"...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two
noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer*
being struck by lightning."
(By Matt Welsh)

"Waving away a cloud of smoke, I look up, and am blinded by a bright, white
light. It's God. No, not Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, but God. In
a booming voice, He says: "THIS IS A SIGN. USE LINUX, THE FREE UNIX SYSTEM
FOR THE 386."
(Matt Welsh)

"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds."
(Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amsterdam
Linux Symposium)

We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.
(seen in someone's .signature)

We come to bury DOS, not to praise it.
(Paul Vojta, vojta@math.berkeley.edu, paraphrasing a quote of Shakespeare)

We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the source code
means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support department.
(Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software)

Who wants to remember that escape-x-alt-control-left shift-b puts you into
super-edit-debug-compile mode?
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands, especially
Emacs.)

"...you might as well skip the Xmas celebration completely, and instead
sit in front of your linux computer playing with the
all-new-and-improved linux kernel version."
(By Linus Torvalds)

Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse
for some of the brain-damages of minix.
(Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum)

Answers to Last Fortune's Questions:

(1) None. (Moses didn't have an ark).
(2) Your mother, by the pigeonhole principle.
(3) I don't know.
(4) Who cares?
(5) 6 (or maybe 4, or else 3). Mr. Alfred J. Duncan of Podunk,
Montana, submitted an interesting solution to Problem 5.
(6) There is an interesting solution to this problem on page 1029 of my
book, which you can pick up for $23.95 at finer bookstores and
bathroom supply outlets (or 99 cents at the table in front of
Papyrus Books).

Beware of computerized fortune-tellers!

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as
difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
-- R. Emerson
-- Quoted from a fortune cookie program
(whose author claims, "Actually, stealing IS easier.")
[to which I reply, "You think it's easy for me to
misconstrue all these misquotations?!?" Ed.]

DELETE A FORTUNE!
Don't some of these fortunes just drive you nuts?!
Wouldn't you like to see some of them deleted from the system?
You can! Just mail to `fortune' with the fortune you hate most,
and we'll make sure it gets expunged.

Did you know about the -o option of the fortune program? It makes a
selection from a set of offensive and/or obscene fortunes. Why not
try it, and see how offended you are? The -a ("all") option will
select a fortune at random from either the offensive or inoffensive
set, and it is suggested that "fortune -a" is the command that you
should have in your .profile or .cshrc. file.

Do not read this fortune under penalty of law.
Violators will be prosecuted.
(Penal Code sec. 2.3.2 (II.a.))

For some reason, this fortune reminds everyone of Marvin Zelkowitz.

Has anyone realized that the purpose of the fortune cookie program is to
defuse project tensions? When did you ever see a cheerful cookie, a
non-cynical, or even an informative cookie?
Perhaps inadvertently, we have a channel for our aggressions. This
still begs the question of whether the cookie releases the pressure or only
serves to blunt the warning signs.

Long live the revolution!
Have a nice day.

In which level of metalanguage are you now speaking?

Since before the Earth was formed and before the sun burned hot in space,
cosmic forces of inexorable power have been working relentlessly toward
this moment in space-time -- your receiving this fortune.

This fortune cookie program out of order. For those in desperate need,
please use the program "________randchar". This program generates random
characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with
something profound. It will, however, take it no time at all to be
more profound than THIS program has ever been.

THIS IS PLEDGE WEEK FOR THE FORTUNE PROGRAM

If you like the fortune program, why not support it now with your
contribution of a pithy fortunes, clean or obscene? We cannot continue
without your support. Less than 14% of all fortune users are contributors.
That means that 86% of you are getting a free ride. We can't go on like
this much longer. Federal cutbacks mean less money for fortunes, and unless
user contributions increase to make up the difference, the fortune program
will have to shut down between midnight and 8 a.m. Don't let this happen.
Mail your fortunes right now to "fortune". Just type in your favorite pithy
saying. Do it now before you forget. Our target is 300 new fortunes by the
end of the week. Don't miss out. All fortunes will be acknowledged. If you
contribute 30 fortunes or more, you will receive a free subscription to "The
Fortune Hunter", our monthly program guide. If you contribute 50 or more,
you will receive a free "Fortune Hunter" coffee mug ....

WARNING:
Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your
mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growthof hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcomeof your favorite war.

You will think of something funnier than this to add to the fortunes.

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
-- Ogden Nash

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be
liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall
be deemed to be a cat.
-- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London

"Anything else you wish to draw to my attention, Mr. Holmes ?"
"The curious incident of the stable dog in the nighttime."
"But the dog did nothing in the nighttime."
"That was the curious incident."
-- A. Conan Doyle, "Silver Blaze"

"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern
technology. Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."

Dogs just don't seem to be able to tell the difference between important people
and the rest of us.

Everyone *knows* cats are on a higher level of existence. These silly humans
are just to big-headed to admit their inferiority.
Just think what a nicer world this would be if it were controlled by
cats.
You wouldn't see cats having waste disposal problems.
They're neat.
They don't have sexual hangups. A cat gets horny, it does something
about it.
They keep reasonable hours. You *never* see a cat up before noon.
They know how to relax. Ever heard of a cat with an ulcer?
What are the chances of a cat starting a nuclear war? Pretty neglible.
It's not that they can't, they just know that there are much better things to
do with ones time. Like lie in the sun and sleep. Or go exploring the world.

Hi! You have reached 555-0129. None of us are here to answer the phone and
the cat doesn't have opposing thumbs, so his messages are illegible. Please
leave your name and message after the beep...

If a can of Alpo costs 38 cents, would it cost $2.50 in Dog Dollars?

If anyone has seen my dog, please contact me at x2883 as soon as possible.
We're offering a substantial reward. He's a sable collie, with three legs,
blind in his left eye, is missing part of his right ear and the tip of his
tail. He's been recently fixed. Answers to "Lucky".

If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a
new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation,
does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must
make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats.
The writer of the letter asked a civil question; attack cats, then, only if
you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer
will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are out of sympathy with
cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the
dedication ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinionof cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things
straight.
-- Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style"

In the eyes of my dog, I'm a man.
-- Martin Mull

No one can feel as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.

Raising pet electric eels is gaining a lot of current popularity.

Speaking of purchasing a dog, never buy a watchdog that's on sale.
After all, everyone knows a bargain dog never bites!

When the fog came in on little cat feet last night, it left these little
muddy paw prints on the hood of my car.

Every now and then, when your life gets complicated and the weasels start
closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then
drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at
top volume and at least a pint of ether.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

The state of some commercial Un*x is more unsecure than any Linux box
without a root password...
-- Bernd Eckenfels

Except for Great Britain. According to ISO 9166 and Internet reality
Great Britain's toplevel domain should be _gb_. Instead, Great Britain
and Nortern Ireland (the United Kingdom) use the toplevel domain _uk_.
They drive on the wrong side of the road, too.
-- PERL book (or DNS and BIND book)

Save yourself from the 'Gates' of hell, use Linux." -- like that one.
-- The_Kind @ LinuxNet

Feel free to contact me (flames about my english and the useless of this
driver will be redirected to /dev/null, oh no, it's full...).
-- Michael Beck, describing the PC-speaker sound device

Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to
be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they
can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the
HP-48 VT-100 emulator.
-- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com

Linux: the choice of a GNU generation
-- ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93

There are two types of Linux developers - those who can spell, and
those who can't. There is a constant pitched battle between the two.
-- From one of the post-1.1.54 kernel update messages posted to c.o.l.a

> > Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I
> > should use Linux over BSD?
>
> No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on
> creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it
> certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able
> to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the
> mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the
> name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too
> technical.
-- Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about Linux

> The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing
> negative so far).
>
> Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains:
> I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented
> that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse.
> If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me
> on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so
> far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something
> better of it (*).
>
> Linus
>
> (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope. Does
> somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke.
-- Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux

> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping
> : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will
> : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff.
> : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so
> : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed.
>
> It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there
> really is a god.
-- Anthony Lovell, to Linus's remarks about porting

If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work.
-- Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications

I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you.
-- Vance Petree, Virginia Power

I once witnessed a long-winded, month-long flamewar over the use of
mice vs. trackballs... It was very silly.
-- Matt Welsh

...Deep Hack Mode -- that mysterious and frightening state of
consciousness where Mortal Users fear to tread.
-- Matt Welsh

...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two
noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer*
being struck by lightning.
-- Matt Welsh

[In 'Doctor' mode], I spent a good ten minutes telling Emacs what I
thought of it. (The response was, 'Perhaps you could try to be less
abusive.')
-- Matt Welsh

Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse
for some of the brain-damages of minix.
-- Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum

We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the source code
means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support department.
-- Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software

We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.
-- seen in someone's .signature

quit When the quit statement is read, the bc processor
is terminated, regardless of where the quit state-
ment is found. For example, "if (0 == 1) quit"
will cause bc to terminate.
-- seen in the manpage for "bc". Note the "if" statement's logic

We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
- Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amterdam Linux Symposium

Waving away a cloud of smoke, I look up, and am blinded by a bright, white
light. It's God. No, not Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, but God. In
a booming voice, He says: "THIS IS A SIGN. USE LINUX, THE FREE UNIX SYSTEM
FOR THE 386.
-- Matt Welsh

/*
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
-- from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [round trip time]

MSDOS didn't get as bad as it is overnight -- it took over ten yearsof careful development.
-- dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca

Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit
operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top
programmers from the underground world of virus development. Bill Gates stated
yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus". Mr. Torvalds
was unavailable for comment ...
-- Robert Manners, rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk, in comp.os.linux.setup

After watching my newly-retired dad spend two weeks learning how to make a new
folder, it became obvious that "intuitive" mostly means "what the writer or
speaker of intuitive likes".
-- Bruce Ediger, bediger@teal.csn.org, on X the intuitiveness of a Mac interface

> No manual is ever necessary.
May I politely interject here: BULLSHIT. That's the biggest Apple lie of all!
-- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces

How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi $i done" in a GUI?
-- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces

>Ever heard of .cshrc?
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?
-- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands

Who wants to remember that escape-x-alt-control-left shift-b puts you into
super-edit-debug-compile mode?
-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands, especially Emacs

Anyone who thinks UNIX is intuitive should be forced to write 5000 lines of
code using nothing but vi or emacs. AAAAACK!
-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands, especially Emacs

Now, it we had this sort of thing:
yield -a for yield to all traffic
yield -t for yield to trucks
yield -f for yield to people walking (yield foot)
yield -d t* for yield on days starting with t

...you'd have a lot of dead people at intersections, and traffic jams you
wouldn't believe...
-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands

Actually, typing random strings in the Finder does the equivalent of
filename completion.
-- Discussion on file completion vs. the Mac Finder

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
We need to find some new terms to describe the rest of us mere mortals
then.
-- Craig Schlenter in response to Linus Torvalds's

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
Surely, Linus is talking about the kind of idiocy that others aspire to :-).
-- Bruce Perens in response to Linus Torvalds's

People disagree with me. I just ignore them.
-- Linus Torvalds, regarding the use of C++ for the Linux kernel

It's now the GNU Emacs of all terminal emulators.
-- Linus Torvalds, regarding the fact that Linux started off as a terminal emulator

Audience: What will become of Linux when the Hurd is ready?
Eric Youngdale: Err... is Richard Stallman here?
-- From the Linux conference in spring '95, Berlin

Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion.
-- Mike Coleman

... of course, this probably only happens for tcsh which uses wait4(),
which is why I never saw it. Serves people who use that abomination
right 8^)
-- Linus Torvalds, about a patch that fixes getrusage for 1.3.26

Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
"happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27

Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27

Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)"
series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the
"ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another
shining example.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29

(I tried to get some documentation out of Digital on this, but as far as
I can tell even _they_ don't have it ;-)
-- Linus Torvalds, in an article on a dnserver

Q: Why shouldn't I simply delete the stuff I never use, it's just taking up
space?
A: This question is in the category of Famous Last Words..
-- From the Frequently Unasked Questions

Footnotes are for things you believe don't really belong in LDP manuals,
but want to include anyway.
-- Joel N. Weber II discussing the 'make' chapter of LPG

Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
"happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus Torvalds, on releasing 1.3.27

Ok, I'm just uploading the new version of the kernel, v1.3.33, also
known as "the buggiest kernel ever".
-- Linus Torvalds

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the
grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin
charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what
they say if they had.
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing Linux v2.0

> If you don't need X then little VT-100 terminals are available for real
> cheap. Should be able to find decent ones used for around $40 each.
> For that price, they're a must for the kitchen, den, bathrooms, etc.. :)
You're right. Can you explain this to my wife?
-- Seen on c.o.l.development.system, on the subject of extra terminals

> What does ELF stand for (in respect to Linux?)
ELF is the first rock group that Ronnie James Dio performed with back in
the early 1970's. In constrast, a.out is a misspelling of the French word
for the month of August. What the two have in common is beyond me, but
Linux users seem to use the two words together.
-- seen on c.o.l.misc

"Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies
like Microsoft." - Some AOL'er.
"To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don
-- From the sig of "Don", don@cs.byu.edu

Besides, its really not worthwhile to use more than two times your physical
ram in swap (except in a select few situations). The performance of the system
becomes so abysmal you'd rather heat pins under your toenails while reciting
Windows95 source code and staring at porn flicks of Bob Dole than actually try
to type something.
-- seen on c.o.l.development.system, about the size of the swap space

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff
on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
-- Linus Torvalds, about his failing hard drive on linux.cs.helsinki.fi

One of the things that hamper Linux's climb to world domination is the
shortage of bad Computer Role Playing Games, or CRaPGs. No operating system
can be considered respectable without one.
-- Brian O'Donnell, odonnllb@tcd.ie

So in the future, one 'client' at a time or you'll be spending CPU time with
lots of little 'child processes'.
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the private life of a Linux nerd

By the way, I can hardly feel sorry for you... All last night I had to listen
to her tears, so great they were redirected to a stream. What? Of _course_
you didn't know. You and your little group no longer have any permissions
around here. She changed her .lock files, too.
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the private life of a Linux nerd

We can use symlinks of course... syslogd would be a symlink to syslogp and
ftpd and ircd would be linked to ftpp and ircp... and of course the
point-to-point protocal paenguin.
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the penguin Linux logo

"... being a Linux user is sort of like living in a house inhabited
by a large family of carpenters and architects. Every morning when
you wake up, the house is a little different. Maybe there is a new
turret, or some walls have moved. Or perhaps someone has temporarily
removed the floor under your bed." - Unix for Dummies, 2nd Edition
-- found in the .sig of Rob Riggs, rriggs@tesser.com

Also another major deciding factor is availability of source code.
It just gives everybody a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that there is
source code available to the product you are using. It allows everybody
to improve on the product and fix bugs etc. sooner that the author(s)
would get the time/chance to.
-- Atif Khan

> Also another major deciding factor is availability of source code.
> It just gives everybody a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that there is
> source code available to the product you are using. It allows everybody
> to improve on the product and fix bugs etc. sooner that the author(s)
> would get the time/chance to.

I think this is one the really BIG reasons for the snowball/onslaughtof Linux and the wealth of stuff available that gets enhanced faster
than the real vendors can keep up.
-- Norman

Well, since MS cant be sure of the username of someone downloading
things, they are going to play it safe and have everything dowloaded
and executed by Explorer as suid root. That way, it will run on ANY
system anywhere. :)
-- George Bonser <grep@cris.com>

Exporting beer from Finnland doesn't seem to be that much of a hassle,
as the Lenigrad Cowboys brought a lot of their brew to the concerts in
Austria.
-- Otmar Lendl <lendl@cosy.sbg.ac.at>

> Yeah, Linus is in the US.
>
> His source trees are in Finland.

OK, someone give him access -fast- ...... ;-)
-- babydr@nwrain.net, because of problems with the kernel

Subject: Linux box finds it hard to wake up in the morning

I've heard of dogs being like their owners, but Linux boxen?
-- Peter Hunter <peter.hunter@blackfriars.oxford.ac.uk>

Win 95 is simplified for the user:

User: What does this configuration thing do?
You: It allows you to modify you settings, for networking,
hardware, protocols, ...
User: Whoa! Layman's terms, please!
You: It changes stuff.
User: That's what I'm looking for! What can it change?
You: This part change IP forwarding. It allows ...
User: Simplify, simplify! What can it do for ME?
You: Nothing, until you understand it.
User: Well it makes me uncomfortable. It looks so technical;
Get rid of it, I want a system *I* can understand.
You: But...
User: Hey, who's system is this anyway?
You: (... rm this, rm that, rm /etc/* ...) "All done."
-- Kevin M. Bealer <kmb203@psu.edu>

If someone can point me to a good and _FREE_ backup software that keeps
track of which files get stored on which tape, we can change to it.
-- Mike Neuffer, admin of i-Connect Corp.

Whoa, first contact!

[...]

Welcome, from the people of Terra (Sol III). We extend our hands in
friendship, and sincerely hope you shall do the same with your
hand-equivelents.
-- Jason Burrell about a russian posting

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of
something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.
-- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

1648 files (84%) out of the files that I mirror disappeared. Since
my delete threshold was set at 90%, all those files are now missing
from my hard drive. It's going to take a loooong time to fetch those
again via 14.4kbps!
-- Brian C. White

> What is the status of Linux' Unicode implementation. Will Linux
> be prepared for the first contact?

We have full klingon console support just in case
-- Alan Cox on linux-kernel

AP/STT. Helsinki, Dec 5th, 6:22 AM. For immediate release.

In order to allay fears about the continuity of the Linux project, Linus
Torvalds together with his manager Tove Monni have released "Linus
v2.0", affectionately known as "Kernel Hacker - The Next Generation".

Linux stock prices on Wall Street rose sharply after the announcement;
as one well-known analyst who wishes to remain anonymous says - "It
shows a long-term commitment, and while we expect a short-term decrease
in productivity, we feel that this solidifies the development in the
long run".

Other analysts downplay the importance of the event, and claim that just
about anybody could have done it. "I'm glad somebody finally told them
about the birds and the bees" one sceptic comments cryptically. But
even the skeptics agree that it is an interesting turn of events.

Others bring up other issues with the new version - "I'm especially
intrigued by the fact that the new version is female, and look forward
to seeing what the impact of that will be on future development. Will
"Red Hat Linux" change to "Pink Hat Linux", for example?"
-- Linus Torvalds announcing that he became father of a girl

* Phaedrus wishes he could get a machine that consists of Sparc IO,
Alpha Processors and sleek design of an SGI
<pp> And intel prices
-- Seen on #Linux

This is a scsi driver, scraes the shit out of me, therefore I tapdanced
and wrote a unix clone around it (C) by linus
-- Somewhere in the kernel tree

<lilo> Fairlight: udp is the light margarine of tcp/ip transport protocols :)
-- Seen on #Linux

>>> FreeOS is an english-centric name

Have you all been stuck in email, or have any of you tried
*pronouncing* that? free-oh-ess? free-ows? fritos? :-)
-- Mark Eichin

The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which
failed to start because of the following error:
The operation completed successfully.
-- Windows NT Server v3.51

Uh... deity is a word, and diety isn't.

Or is it supposed to be one of those recursive acronyms? Diety Is
Excellent To You. Deity Eats Icecream That's Yellow. Diety Is
Eloping To Yokohama. I'll stop now.
-- Guy Maor

* SynrG notes that the number of configuration questions to answer in sendmail
is NON-TRIVIAL
-- Seen on #Debian

* In anticipation of 2.10.02 release, updated to patchlevel
+ircu2.10.01+.config6-7.config7-8.lgline3.iwho.limit.glibc.motdcache2.trace.whois1-2.config8-9.statsw.sprintf2-3.msgtree2.memleak1-2+.msgtree2-3.gline8-9.gline9-10.invite2.rbr.stats.numclients.whisper.whisper1-2.stats1-2.nokick1-2.chroot.config9-11.snomask7-8.limi+t1-3.userip1-3.userip3-4.config11-12.config12-13.umode2-3.akillsbt.who4-5.kn.kn1-2.freebsdcore2.msgtree3-5.y2k.glibc1-2.rmfunc.msgf+lags2.who5-6.nickchange2.glibc2-3.modeless3
-- From the annoucement of ircd 2.10.01-3 for Debian GNU/Linux

<posix> this guy _is_ crazy
<stargazer> posix: from the looks of Enlightenment he's on LSD
<posix> LSD is nothing compared to what this guy's on..
-- Seen on #Unix

Alan Cox wrote:
>> On any procmail new enough not to be full of security holes you set
>Brain on, Imeant majordomo of course 8)
You got me worried there for a brief (very brief) moment :-).
-- Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless)

I just uploaded xtoolplaces-1.6. It fixes all bugs but one: It still
coredumps instead of doing something useful. The upstream author's
e-mail address bounces, Redhat doesn't provide it and I never used it.
-- Sven Rudolph <sr1@os.inf.tu-dresden.de>

> I thing you're missing the capability of Makefiles.

It takes several _hours_ to do `make' a second time on my
machine with the latest glibc sources (and no files are recompiled a
second time). I think I'll remove `build' after changing one file if
I want to recompile it.
-- Juan Cespedes <cespedes@debian.org>

These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After
unzipping, these files can be viewed in any text editor, including
all versions of Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer
-- From Micro$oft

Linus Torvalds:
> This is the special easter release of linux, more mundanely called 1.3.84
Winfried Truemper:
> Umh, oh. What do you mean by "special easter release"?. Will it quit
> working today and rise on easter?

I've seen people with new children before, they go from ultra happy to
looking like something out of a zombie film in about a week.
-- Alan Cox about Linus after his 2nd daughter

I expect that noone has objections. However, if I'd only add these entries
to the list because `I think it's the right thing to do', I'd get a lot of
flames afterwards :)
-- Christian Schwarz

<james> Are we going to make an emacs out of apt?
APT - Debian in a program. It even does your laundry
-- Seen on #Debian

Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
first two laws.

The truth is not free. It's that simple. If you change the truth, it is no
longer true - so the truth is not free!
-- Jules Bean about freeness of documentation

<jim> Lemme make sure I'm not wasting time here... bcwhite will remove
pkgs that havent been fixed that have outstanding bugs of severity
"important". True or false?
<JHM> jim: "important" or higher. True.
<jim> Then we're about to lose ftp.debian.org and dpkg :)
* netgod will miss dpkg -- it was occasionally useful
<Joey> We still have rpm....
-- Seen on #Debian

The problem here (as someon else stated) is that when multiple dists
use the same package format it only gives a "false sense of compatibility".
-- Stephen Carpenter <sjc@delphi.com>

The most effective has probably been Linux/8086 - that was a joke
that got out of hand. So far out of hand in fact its almost approaching
usability because other folks thought it worth doing - Alistair Riddoch
especially.
-- Alan Cox

The only other people who might benefit from Linux8086 would be ownersof PDP/11's and other roomsized computers from the same era.
-- Alan Cox

Ha. I say let them try -- even vi+perl couldn't match the power of an
editor which is, after all, its own OS. ;-)
-- Johnie Ingram on debian-devel, about linking vim with libperl.so

Being overloaded is the sign of a true Debian maintainer.
-- JHM on #Debian

There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count & those who can't.
-- Unknown source

Despite the best efforts of a quantum bigfoot drive (yes I know everyone
told me they suck, now I know they were right) 2.1.109ac1 is now available
-- Alan Cox announcing Linux 2.1.109ac1

<Overfiend> partycle: I seriously do need a vacation from this
package. I actually had a DREAM about introducing a
stupid new bug into xbase-preinst last night. That's a
Bad Sign.
-- Seen on #Debian shortly before the release of Debian 2.0

<core> i'm glad Debian finally got into
polar-deep-freeze-we-arent-shitting-you state finally.
-- Seen on #Debian shortly before the release of Debian 2.0

<dark> Looks like the channel is back to normal :)
<jim> You mean it's not scrolling faster than anyone can read? :)
-- Seen on #Debian after the release of Debian 2.0

Perhaps the RBLing (Realtime Black Hole) of msn.com recently, which
prevented a large amount of mail going out for about 4 days, has had a
positive influence in Redmond. They did agree to work on their anti-relay
capabilities at their POPs to get the RBL lifted.
-- Bill Campbell on Smail3-users

When a float occurs on the same page as the start of a supertabular
you can expect unexpected results.
-- Documentation of supertabular.sty

Someone on IRC was very sad about the uptime of his machine wrapping
from 497 days to 0.
-- linux-kernel

We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as
supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
communication.
-- Dennis Ritchie

> <magical +3 sigh of hyperbole deflection>

The branden dodges your magical sigh. The branden attacks you with a
slew of words! The branden misses!

-- Henning Makholm in <yahsmr7dk9k.fsf@pc-043.diku.dk>

A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally
established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon
or three normal sized billiard balls.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

"A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent to admit,
let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact remains that
there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one reason or another,
completely immune to any direct magical spell. It is for this group of
beings that the magician learns the subtleties of using indirect spells.
It also does no harm, in dealing with these matters, to carry a large club
near your person at all times."
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII

An ancient proverb summed it up: when a wizard is tired of looking for
broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they become soggy and hard to
light.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good
with ketchup."

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
-- Aleister Crowley

Eight was also the Number of Bel-Shamharoth, which was why a sensible wizard
would never mention the number if he could avoid it. Or you'll be eight
alive, apprentices were jocularly warned. Bel-Shamharoth was especially
attracted to dabblers in magic who, by being as it were beachcombers on the
shores of the unnatural, were already half-enmeshed in his nets.
Rincewind's room number in his hall of residence had been 7a. He hadn't
been surprised.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Sending of Eight"

"How do you know she is a unicorn?" Molly demanded. "And why were you afraid
to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her."
"I doubt that I will feel like talking for very long," the cat
replied without rancor. "I would not waste time in foolishness if I were
you. As to your first question, no cat out of its first fur can ever be
deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them. As for your
second question --" Here he faltered, and suddenly became very interested
in washing; nor would he speak until he had licked himself fluffy and then
licked himself smooth again. Even then he would not look at Molly, but
examined his claws.
"If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been
hers and not my own, not ever again."
-- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because
one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots
who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally
suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say
the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those
studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association?
To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation from a bunch of
wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their
mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just
about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the the
heroes, why don't you ...
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

It is well known that *things* from undesirable universes are always seeking
an entrance into this one, which is the psychic equivalent of handy for the
buses and closer to the shops.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

It seems there's this magician working one of the luxury cruise ships
for a few years. He doesn't have to change his routines much as the audiences
change over fairly often, and he's got a good life. The only problem is the
ship's parrot, who perches in the hall and watches him night after night, year
after year. Finally, the parrot figures out how almost every trick works and
starts giving it away for the audience. For example, when the magician makes
a bouquet of flowers disappear, the parrot squawks "Behind his back! Behind
his back!" Well, the magician is really annoyed at this, but there's not much
he can do about it as the parrot is a ship's mascot and very popular with the
passengers.
One night, the ship strikes some floating debris, and sinks without
a trace. Almost everyone aboard was lost, except for the magician and the
parrot. For three days and nights they just drift, with the magician clinging
to one end of a piece of driftwood and the parrot perched on the other end.
As the sun rises on the morning of the fourth day, the parrot walks over to
the magician's end of the log. With obvious disgust in his voice, he snaps
"OK, you win, I give up. Where did you hide the ship?"

Rincewind had generally been considered by his tutors to be a natural wizard
in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. He probably would have
been thrown out of Unseen University anyway--he couldn't remember spells and
smoking made him feel ill.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

Somewhere, just out of sight, the unicorns are gathering.

The default Magic Word, "Abracadabra", actually is a corruption of the
Hebrew phrase "ha-Bracha dab'ra" which means "pronounce the blessing".

"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your
hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do."
-- McCloctnik the Lucid

The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood as he
reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray
Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palaceof Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in twenty-five of
him are dead, he is alive.
"Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached
everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce
host which out-numbers Lankhamar's inhabitants by fifty to one -- and
equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city."
"How?" demanded Fafhrd.
Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know."
-- Fritz Leiber, "The Swords of Lankhmar"

"Then what is magic for?" Prince Lir demanded wildly. "What use is
wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?" He gripped the magician's shoulder
hard, to keep from falling.
Schmendrick did not turn his head. With a touch of sad mockery in
his voice, he said, "That's what heroes are for."
...
"Yes, of course," he [Prince Lir] said. "That is exactly what heroes
are for. Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but
heroes are meant to die for unicorns."
-- Peter Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells and
fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated pools here
and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving them parched for
wonder. There are also those who believe that if you stick your fingers up
your nose and blow, it will increase your intelligence.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII

"Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year
strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap
crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts.
There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with
a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance
salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in
square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down
soggy potato chips."
"But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito.
"Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good
copy."
-- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings"

Watch Rincewind.

Look at him. Scrawny, like most wizards, and clad in a dark red robe on
which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might
have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his
master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for
heterosexuality. Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon
that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic
whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There.
Graduates were usually destined for mageship at least, but Rincewind--after
an unfortunate event--had left knowing only one spell and made a living of
sorts around the town by capitalizing on an innate gift for languages. He
avoided work as a rule, but had a quickness of wit that put his
acquaintances in mind of a bright rodent.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

100 buckets of bits on the bus
100 buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FF buckets of bits on the bus

FF buckets of bits on the bus
FF buckets of bits
Take one down, short it to ground
FE buckets of bits on the bus

ad infinitum...

99 blocks of crud on the disk,
99 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
100 blocks of crud on the disk!

100 blocks of crud on the disk,
100 blocks of crud!
You patch a bug, and dump it again:
101 blocks of crud on the disk! ...

A bit of talcum
Is always walcum
-- Ogden Nash

A bunch of the boys were whooping it in the Malemute saloon;
The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
-- Robert W. Service

A cousin of mine once said about money,
money is always there but the pockets change;
it is not in the same pockets after a change,
and that is all there is to say about money.
-- Gertrude Stein

A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.
-- THE ABC'S OF UNIX

A lady with one of her ears applied
To an open keyhole heard, inside,
Two female gossips in converse free --
The subject engaging them was she.
"I think", said one, "and my husband thinks
That she's a prying, inquisitive minx!"
As soon as no more of it she could hear
The lady, indignant, removed her ear.
"I will not stay," she said with a pout,
"To hear my character lied about!"
-- Gopete Sherany

A little word of doubtful number,
A foe to rest and peaceful slumber.
If you add an "s" to this,
Great is the metamorphosis.
Plural is plural now no more,
And sweet what bitter was before.
What am I?

A man of genius makes no mistakes.
His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
-- James Joyce, "Ulysses"

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet--
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
-- Dorothy Parker, "One Perfect Rose"

A-Z affectionately,
1 to 10 alphabetically,
from here to eternity without in betweens,
still looking for a custom fit in an off-the-rack world,
sales talk from sales assistants
when all i want to do is lower your resistance,
no rhythm in cymbals no tempo in drums,
love's on arrival,
she comes when she comes,
right on the target but wide of the mark...

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
-- James Henry Leigh Hunt, "Abou Ben Adhem"

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open,
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads
On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain. And futures have
A way of falling down in midflight,
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you really are strong,
And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn
With every goodbye you learn.
-- Veronic Shoffstall, "Comes the Dawn"

Again she fled, but swift he came.
Tin'uviel! Tin'uviel!
He called her by her elvish name;
And there she halted listening.
One moment stood she, and a spell
His voice laid on her: Beren came
And doom fell on Tin'uviel
That in his arms lay glistening.

As Beren looked into her eyes
Within the shadows of her hair,
The trembling starlight of the skies
He saw there mirrored shimmering.
Tin'uviel the elven-fair,
Immortal maiden elven-wise,
About him cast her shadowy hair
And arms like silver glimmering.

Long was the way that fate them bore,
O'er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
And woods of nightshade morrowless.
The Sundering Seas between them lay,
And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
In the forest singing sorrowless.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Against Idleness and Mischief

How doth the little busy bee How skillfully she builds her cell!
Improve each shining hour, How neat she spreads the wax!
And gather honey all the day And labours hard to store it well
From every opening flower! With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill In books, or work, or healthful play,
I would be busy too; Let my first years be passed,
For Satan finds some mischief still That I may give for every day
For idle hands to do. Some good account at last.
-- Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

Ah, but the choice of dreams to live,
there's the rub.

For all dreams are not equal,
some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer

But at least one must be lived ... and died.

Ah, my friends, from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously:
"Are birds free from the chains of the sky-way?"
-- Bob Dylan

Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
You take one down, and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.

All I need to have a good time,
Is a reefer, a woman and a bottle of wine.
With those three things I don't need no sunshine,
A reefer, a woman and a bottle of wine.

All I want is to never grow old,
I want to wash in a bathtub of gold.
I want 97 kilos already rolled,
I want to wash in a bathtub of gold.

I want to light my cigars with 10 dollar bills,
I like to have a cattle ranch in Beverly Hills.
I want a bottle of Red Eye that's always filled,
I like to have a cattle ranch in Beverly Hills.
-- Country Joe and the Fish, "Zachariah"

All that you touch, And all you create,
All that you see, And all you destroy,
All that you taste, All that you do,
All you feel, And all you say,
And all that you love, All that you eat,
And all that you hate, And everyone you meet,
All you distrust, All that you slight,
All you save, And everyone you fight,
And all that you give, And all that is now,
And all that you deal, And all that is gone,
All that you buy, And all that's to come,
Beg, borrow or steal, And everything under the sun is
in tune,
But the sun is eclipsed
By the moon.

There is no dark side of the moon... really... matter of fact it's all dark.
-- Pink Floyd, "Dark Side of the Moon"

All the lines have been written There's been Sandburg,
It's sad but it's true Keats, Poe and McKuen
With all the words gone, They all had their day
What's a young poet to do? And knew what they're doin'

But of all the words written The bird is a strange one,
And all the lines read, So small and so tender
There's one I like most, Its breed still unknown,
And by a bird it was said! Not to mention its gender.

It reminds me of days of So what is this line
Both gloom and of light. Whose author's unknown
It still lifts my spirits And still makes me giggle
And starts the day right. Even now that I'm grown?

I've read all the greats
Both starving and fat,
But none was as great as
"I tot I taw a puddy tat."
-- Etta Stallings, "An Ode To Childhood"

An Hacker there was, one of the finest sort
Who controlled the system; graphics was his sport.
A manly man, to be a wizard able;
Many a protected file he had sitting on his table.
His console, when he typed, a man might hear
Clicking and feeping wind as clear,
Aye, and as loud as does the machine room bell
Where my lord Hacker was Prior of the cell.
The Rule of good St Savage or St Doeppnor
As old and strict he tended to ignore;
He let go by the things of yesterday
And took the modern world's more spacious way.
He did not rate that text as a plucked hen
Which says that Hackers are not holy men.
And that a hacker underworked is a mere
Fish out of water, flapping on the pier.
That is to say, a hacker out of his cloister.
That was a text he held not worth an oyster.
And I agreed and said his views were sound;
Was he to study till his head wend round
Poring over books in the cloisters? Must he toil
As Andy bade and till the very soil?
Was he to leave the world upon the shelf?
Let Andy have his labor to himself!
-- Chaucer
[well, almost. Ed.]

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks with the one word, "unless."
Whatever THAT meant, well, I just couldn't guess.
That was long, long ago, and each day since that day,
I've worried and worried and worried away.
Through the years as my buildings have fallen apart,
I've worried about it with all of my heart.

"BUT," says the Oncler, "now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear!
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better - it's not.
So... CATCH!" cries the Oncler. He lets something fall.
"It's a truffula seed. It's the last one of all!

"You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds.
And truffula trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new truffula -- treat it with care.
Give it clean water and feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest -- protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back!"

And as we stand on the edge of darkness
Let our chant fill the void
That others may know

In the land of the night
The ship of the sun
Is drawn by
The grateful dead.
-- Tibetan "Book of the Dead," ca. 4000 BC.

And did those feet, in ancient times,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
In England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon these crowded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

And here I wait so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going thru all of these things twice
-- Dylan, "Memphis Blues Again"

And I heard Jeff exclaim,
As they strolled out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all --
You take credit cards, right?"
-- "Outsiders" comic

And if sometime, somewhere, someone asketh thee,
"Who kilt thee?", tell them it 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy!

And if you wonder,
What I am doing,
As I am heading for the sink.
I am spitting out all the bitterness,
Along with half of my last drink.

And so it was, later,
As the miller told his tale,
That her face, at first just ghostly,
Turned a whiter shade of pale.
-- Procol Harum

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

And... What in the world ever became of Sweet Jane?
She's lost her sparkle, you see she isn't the same.
Livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine
All a friend can say is "Ain't it a shame?"
-- The Grateful Dead

Antonio Antonio
Was tired of living alonio
He thought he would woo Antonio Antonio
Miss Lucamy Lu, Rode of on his polo ponio
Miss Lucamy Lucy Molonio. And found the maid
In a bowery shade,
Sitting and knitting alonio.
Antonio Antonio
Said if you will be my ownio
I'll love tou true Oh nonio Antonio
And buy for you You're far too bleak and bonio
An icery creamry conio. And all that I wish
You singular fish
Is that you will quickly begonio.
Antonio Antonio
Uttered a dismal moanio
And went off and hid
Or I'm told that he did
In the Antartical Zonio.

Are there those in the land of the brave
Who can tell me how I should behave
When I am disgraced
Because I erased
A file I intended to save?

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list -- I've got a little listOf society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed -- who never would be missed.
-- Koko, "The Mikado"

Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely
get your Feet wet. Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Beneath this stone lies Murphy,
They buried him today,
He lived the life of Riley,
While Riley was away.

Black shiny mollies and bright colored guppies,
Shy little angels as gentle as puppies,
Swimming and diving with scarcely a swish,
They were just some of my tropical fish.

Then I got mantas that sting in the water,
Deadly piranhas that itch for a slaughter,
Savage male betas that bite with a squish,
Now I have many less tropical fish.

If you think that
Fish are peaceful
That's an empty wish.
Just dump them together
And leave them alone,
And soon you will have -- no fish.
-- To My Favorite Things

Boy, get your head out of the stars above,
You get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love.
Save your heart and let your body be enough,
To get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love.
Save your heart and let your body be enough,
And get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love.
-- Mac Macinelli, "Minimum Love"

Breathe deep the gathering gloom.
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bed-sitter people look back and lament;
another day's useless energies spent.

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son.
Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night;
Removes the colors from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white.
But we decide which is real, and which is an illusion."
-- The Moody Blues, "Days of Future Passed"

But I was there and I saw what you did,
I saw it with my own two eyes.
So you can wipe off that grin;
I know where you've been--
It's all been a pack of lies!

Buzz off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyesOf hateful soreness, purge mine ears of corn;
Less dear than army ants in apple pies
Art thou, old prune-face, with thy chestnuts worn,
Dropt from thy peeling lips like lousy fruit;
Like honeybees upon the perfum'd rose
They suck, and like the double-breasted suit
Are out of date; therefore, Banana Nose,
Go fly a kite, thy welcome's overstayed;
And stem the produce of thy waspish wits:
Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed;
Thy cheer, like thy complexion, is the pits.
Be off, I say; go bug somebody new,
Scram, beat it, get thee hence, and nuts to you.

By the time you swear you're his,
shivering and sighing
and he vows his passion is
infinite, undying --
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
-- Dorothy Parker, "Unfortunate Coincidence"

Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes,
Calm down, it's only bits and bytes,
Calm down, and speak to me in English,
Please realize that I'm not one of your computerites.

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world.
-- The Beach Boys

Cecil, you're my final hopeOf finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously alive and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or the other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't.
If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will *___and* I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo.
-- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendiumof human knowledge" by Cecil Adams

Christmas time is here, by Golly; Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens;
Disapproval would be folly; Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens;
Deck the halls with hunks of holly; Even though the prospect sickens,
Fill the cup and don't say when... Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas day, you can't get sore; Relations sparing no expense'll,
Your fellow man you must adore; Send some useless old utensil,
There's time to rob him all the more, Or a matching pen and pencil,
The other three hundred and sixty-four! Just the thing I need... how nice.

It doesn't matter how sincere Hark The Herald-Tribune sings,
It is, nor how heartfelt the spirit; Advertising wondrous things.
Sentiment will not endear it; God Rest Ye Merry Merchants,
What's important is... the price. May you make the Yuletide pay.
Angels We Have Heard On High,
Let the raucous sleighbells jingle; Tell us to go out and buy.
Hail our dear old friend, Kris Kringle, Sooooo...
Driving his reindeer across the sky,
Don't stand underneath when they fly by!
-- Tom Lehrer

Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentence fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter -- and the bird is on the wing.
-- Omar Khayyam

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures proveOf golden sands and crystal brooks
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
If you would be my POSSLQ.

You live with me, and I with you,
And you will be my POSSLQ.
I'll be your friend and so much more;
That's what a POSSLQ is for.

And everything we will confess;
Yes, even to the IRS.
Some day on what we both may earn,
Perhaps we'll file a joint return.
You'll share my pad, my taxes, joint;
You'll share my life - up to a point!
And that you'll be so glad to do,
Because you'll be my POSSLQ.

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures proveOf golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
-- John Donne

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

Come, muse, let us sing of rats!
-- From a poem by James Grainger, 1721-1767

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-fullOf direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visiting of nature
Shake my fell purpose, not keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall the in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry `Hold, hold!'
-- Lady MacBeth

Confusion will be my epitaph
as I walk a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh
but I fear that tomorrow we'll be crying.
-- King Crimson, "In the Court of the Crimson King"

Declared guilty... of displaying feelings of an almost human nature.
-- Pink Floyd, "The Wall"

Despising machines to a man,
The Luddites joined up with the Klan,
And ride out by night
In a sheeting of white
To lynch all the robots they can.
-- C. M. and G. A. Maxson

Do your otters do the shimmy?
Do they like to shake their tails?
Do your wombats sleep in tophats?
Is your garden full of snails?

Don't be concerned, it will not harm you,
It's only me pursuing something I'm not sure of,
Across my dreams, with neptive wonder,
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.

Don't let nobody tell you what you cannot do;
don't let nobody tell you what's impossible for you;
don't let nobody tell you what you got to do,
or you'll never know ... what's on the other side of the rainbow...
remember, if you don't follow your dreams,
you'll never know what's on the other side of the rainbow...
-- melba moore, "the other side of the rainbow"

Double Bucky, you're the one,
You make my keyboard so much fun,
Double Bucky, an additional bit or two, (Vo-vo-de-o)
Control and meta, side by side,
Augmented ASCII, 9 bits wide!
Double Bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!

Oh, I sure wish that I,
Had a couple of bits more!
Perhaps a set of pedals to make the number of bits four.

Double Double Bucky! Double Bucky left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double Bucky, I'd like a whole word of,
Double Bucky, I'm happy I heard of,
Double Bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!
-- to Nicholas Wirth, who suggested that an extra bit
be added to terminal codes on 36-bit machines for use
by screen editors. [to the tune of "Rubber Ducky"]

Down to the Banana Republics,
Down to the tropical sun.
Go the expatriated Americans,
Hoping to find some fun.
Some of them go for the sailing,
Caught by the lure of the sea.
Trying to find what is ailing,
Living in the land of the free.
Some of them are running from lovers,
Leaving no forward address.
Some of them are running tons of ganja,
Some are running from the IRS.
Late at night you will find them,
In the cheap hotels and bars.
Hustling the senoritas,
While they dance beneath the stars.
-- Jimmy Buffet, "Banana Republics"

Easy come and easy go,
some call me easy money,
Sometimes life is full of laughs,
and sometimes it ain't funny
You may think that I'm a fool
and sometimes that is true,
But I'm goin' to heaven in a flash of fire,
with or without you.
-- Hoyt Axton

Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Even in the Moment of
Our Earliest Kiss", 1931

Ever since I was a young boy,
I've hacked the ARPA net,
From Berkeley down to Rutgers, He's on my favorite terminal,
Any access I could get, He cats C right into foo,
But ain't seen nothing like him, His disciples lead him in,
On any campus yet, And he just breaks the root,
That deaf, dumb, and blind kid, Always has full SYS-PRIV's,
Sure sends a mean packet. Never uses lint,
That deaf, dumb, and blind kid,
Sure sends a mean packet.
He's a UNIX wizard,
There has to be a twist.
The UNIX wizard's got Ain't got no distractions,
Unlimited space on disk. Can't hear no whistles or bells,
How do you think he does it? Can't see no message flashing,
I don't know. Types by sense of smell,
What makes him so good? Those crazy little programs,
The proper bit flags set,
That deaf, dumb, and blind kid,
Sure sends a mean packet.
-- UNIX Wizard

Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day;
And every day that I've been good,
I get an orange after food.
The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure--
Or else his dear papa is poor.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their
fingers crossed. Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the
good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay
poor, the rich get rich. That's how it goes. Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. Everybody knows the captain
lied. Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog
just died.

Everybody talking to their pockets. Everybody wants a box of chocolates
and long stem rose. Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that you love me, baby. Everybody knows that you really
do. Everybody knows that you've been faithful, give or take a night or
two. Everybody knows you've been discreet, but there were so many people
you just had to meet without your clothes. And everybody knows.

And everybody knows it's now or never. Everybody knows that it's me or you.
And everybody knows that you live forever when you've done a line or two.
Everybody knows the deal is rotten: Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
for you ribbons and bows. And everybody knows.
-- Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

Farewell we call to hearth and hall!
Though wind may blow and rain may fall,
We must away ere break of day
Far over wood and mountain tall.

To Rivendell, where Elves yet dwell
In glades beneath the misty fell,
Through moor and waste we ride in haste,
And whither then we cannot tell.

With foes ahead, behind us dread,
Beneath the sky shall be our bed,
Until at last our toil be passed,
Our journey done, our errand sped.

We must away! We must away!
We ride before the break of day!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Felix Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadroped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predelection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents:
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance;
And when not being utilitized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.
-- Lt. Cmdr. Data, "An Ode to Spot"

Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
-- Stevenson, "Treasure Island"

Five names that I can hardly stand to hear,
Including yours and mine and one more chimp who isn't here,
I can see the ladies talking how the times is gettin' hard,
And that fearsome excavation on Magnolia boulevard,
Yes, I'm goin' insane,
And I'm laughing at the frozen rain,
Well, I'm so alone, honey when they gonna send me home?
Bad sneakers and a pina colada my friend,
Stopping on the avenue by Radio City, with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend...
You fellah, you tearin' up the street,
You wear that white tuxedo, how you gonna beat the heat,
Do you take me for a fool, do you think that I don't see,
That ditch out in the Valley that they're diggin' just for me,
Yes, and goin' insane,
You know I'm laughin' at the frozen rain,
Feel like I'm so alone, honey when they gonna send me home?
(chorus)
-- Bad Sneakers, "Steely Dan"

But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught.
Before he could mind, Tom slipped behing
And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him! Darn him!
A bump o' the boot on the seat, Tom thoguht,
Would be the way to larn him.

But harder than stone is the flesh and boneOf a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain's root,
For the seat of a troll don't feel it.
Peel it! Heal it!
Old Troll laughed, when he heard Tom groan,
And he knew his toes could feel it.

Tom's leg is game, since home he came,
And his bootless foot is lasting lame;
But Troll don't care, and he's still there
With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner! Boner!
Troll's old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

For knighthood is not in the feats of war,
As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong,
But in a cause which truth cannot defer:
He ought himself for to make sure and strong,
Just to keep mixt with mercy among:
And no quarrel a knight ought to take
But for a truth, or for the common's sake.
-- Stephen Hawes

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
-- Swinburne

Get in touch with your feelings of hostility against the dying light.
-- Dylan Thomas [paraphrased periphrastically]

Gibson's Springtime Song (to the tune of "Deck the Halls"):

'Tis the season to chase mousies (Fa la la la la, la la la la)
Snatch them from their little housies (...)
First we chase them 'round the field (...)
Then we have them for a meal (...)

Toss them here and catch them there (...)
See them flying through the air (...)
Watch them fly and hear them squeal (...)
Falling mice have great appeal (...)

See the hunter stretched before us (...)
He's chased the mice in field and forest (...)
Watch him clean his long white whiskers (...)Of the blood of little critters (...)

Gil-galad was an Elven-king.Of him the harpers sadly sing:
the last whose realm was fair and free
between the Mountains and the Sea.

His sword was long, his lance was keen,
his shining helm afar was seen;
the countless stars of heaven's field
were mirrored in his silver shield.

But long ago he rode away,
and where he dwelleth none can say;
for into darkness fell his star
in Mordor where the shadows are.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Gimme Twinkies, gimme wine,
Gimme jeans by Calvin Kline ...
But if you split those atoms fine,
Mama keep 'em off those genes of mine!

Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe,
Bold I can meet -- perhaps may turn his blow!
But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save me, oh save me from the candid friend.
-- George Canning

Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice -- even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss -- and when.
Remember that two wrongs never make a right,
But that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on "HOLD".
Be comforted, that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
And despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.

You are a fluke of the universe ...
You have no right to be here.
Whether you can hear it or not, the universe
Is laughing behind your back.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

God rest ye CS students now, The bearings on the drum are gone,
Let nothing you dismay. The disk is wobbling, too.
The VAX is down and won't be up, We've found a bug in Lisp, and Algol
Until the first of May. Can't tell false from true.
The program that was due this morn, And now we find that we can't get
Won't be postponed, they say. At Berkeley's 4.2.
(chorus) (chorus)

We've just received a call from DEC, And now some cheery news for you,
They'll send without delay The network's also dead,
A monitor called RSuX We'll have to print your files on
It takes nine hundred K. The line printer instead.
The staff committed suicide, The turnaround time's nineteen weeks.
We'll bury them today. And only cards are read.
(chorus) (chorus)

And now we'd like to say to you CHORUS: Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
Before we go away, Comfort and joy,
We hope the news we've brought to you Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Won't ruin your whole day.
You've got another program due, tomorrow, by the way.
(chorus)
-- to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright
Hear him whip the women, just around midnight

Ah, brown sugar how come you taste so good?
Ah, brown sugar just like a young girl should

Drums beating cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonderin' where it's gonna stop
House boy knows that he's doing alright
You should a heard him just around midnight.
...
I bet your mama was tent show queen
And all her girlfriends were sweet sixteen
I'm no school boy but I know what I like
You should have heard me just around midnight.
-- Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar"

Hack placidly amidst the noisy printers and remember what prizes there
may be in Science. As fast as possible get a good terminal on a good system.
Enter your data clearly but always encrypt your results. And listen to others,
even the dull and ignorant, for they may be your customers. Avoid loud and
aggressive persons, for they are sales reps.
If you compare your outputs with those of others, you may be surprised,
for always there will be greater and lesser numbers than you have crunched.
Keep others interested in your career, and try not to fumble; it can be a real
hassle and could change your fortunes in time.
Exercise system control in your experiments, for the world is full of
bugs. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive
for linearity and everywhere papers are full of approximations. Strive for
proportionality. Especially, do not faint when it occurs. Neither be cyclical
about results; for in the face of all data analysis it is sure to be noticed.
Take with a grain of salt the anomalous data points. Gracefully pass
them on to the youth at the next desk. Nurture some mutual funds to shield
you in times of sudden layoffs. But do not distress yourself with imaginings
-- the real bugs are enough to screw you badly. Murphy's Law runs the
Universe -- and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt <Curl>B*n dS = 0.
Therefore, grab for a piece of the pie, with whatever proposals you
can conceive of to try. With all the crashed disks, skewed data, and broken
line printers, you can still have a beautiful secretary. Be linear. Strive
to stay employed.
-- Technolorata, "Analog"

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn, But ranged as infantry,
We should have sat us down to wet And staring face to face,
Right many a nipperkin! I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because --
Because he was my foe, He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Just so: my foe of course he was; Off-hand-like -- just as I --
That's clear enough; although Was out of work -- had sold his traps
No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is
Or help to half-a-crown."
-- Thomas Hardy

of course they're only bits and bytes
and characters and strings
and files

just some old textfiles from my old boyfriend
telling me he loves me and
he'll take care of me

simply a discarded printout of a friend's directory
deep intimate secrets and
how he doesn't trust me

couldn't hurt me more if they were scented in lavender or mould
on personal stationery
-- terri@csd4.milw.wisc.edu

Have you seen the old man in the closed down market,
Kicking up the papers in his worn out shoes?
In his eyes you see no pride, hands hang loosely at his side
Yesterdays papers, telling yesterdays news.

How can you tell me you're lonely,
And say for you the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand
Lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind...

Have you seen the old man outside the sea-man's mission
Memories fading like the metal ribbons that he wears.
In our winter city the rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero and a world that doesn't care...

Have you seen the well-to-do, up and down Park Avenue?
On that famous thoroughfare, with their noses in the air,
High hats and Arrow collars, white spats and lots of dollars,
Spending every dime, for a wonderful time...
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to,
Why don't you go where fashion sits,
...
Dressed up like a million dollar trooper,
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper, (super dooper)
Come, let's mix where Rockefeller's walk with sticks,
Or umberellas, in their mitts,
Puttin' on the Ritz.
...
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to,
Why don't you go where fashion sits,
Puttin' on the Ritz.
Puttin' on the Ritz.
Puttin' on the Ritz.
Puttin' on the Ritz.

He heard there oft the flying soundOf feet as light as linden-leaves,Of music welling underground,
In hidden hollows quavering.
Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,
And one by one with sighing sound
Whispering fell the beechen leaves
In the wintry woodland wavering.

He sought her ever, wandering far
Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,
By light of moon and ray of star
In frosty heavens shivering.
Her mantle glinted in the moon,
As on a hill-top high and far
She danced, and at her feet was strewn
A mist of silver quivering.

When winter passed, she came again,
And her song released the sudden spring,
Like rising lark, and falling rain,
And melting water bubbling.
He saw the elven-flowers spring
About her feet, and healed again
He longed by her to dance and sing
Upon the grass untroubling.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Here in my heart, I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Sta"el;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.

-- PDQ Bach's epitaph, as requested by his cousin Betty
Sue Bach and written by the local doggeral catcher;
"The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach", Peter Schickele

Higgeldy Piggeldy,
Hamlet of Elsinore
Ruffled the critics by
Dropping this bomb:
"Phooey on Freud and his
Psychoanalysis --
Oedipus, Shmoedipus,
I just love Mom."

History is curious stuff
You'd think by now we had enough
Yet the fact remains I fear
They make more of it every year.

Hit them biscuits with another touch of gravy,
Burn that sausage just a match or two more done.
Pour my black old coffee longer,
While that smell is gettin' stronger
A semi-meal ain't nuthin' much to want.

Loan me ten, I got a feelin' it'll save me,
With an ornery soul who don't shoot pool for fun,
If that coat'll fit you're wearin',
The Lord'll bless your sharin'
A semi-friend ain't nuthin' much to want.

And let me halfway fall in love,
For part of a lonely night,
With a semi-pretty woman in my arms.
Yes, I could halfway fall in deep--
Into a snugglin', lovin' heap,
With a semi-pretty woman in my arms.
-- Elroy Blunt

Hop along my little friends, up the Withywindle!
Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle.
Down west sinks the Sun; soon you will be groping.
When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open,
Out of the winfow-panes light will twinkle yellow.
Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow!
Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you.
Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"

I always will remember -- I was in no mood to trifle;
'Twas a year ago November -- I got down my trusty rifle
I went out to shoot some deer And went out to stalk my prey --
On a morning bright and clear. What a haul I made that day!
I went and shot the maximum I tied them to my bumper and
The game laws would allow: I drove them home somehow,
Two game wardens, seven hunters, Two game wardens, seven hunters,
And a cow. And a cow.

The Law was very firm, it People ask me how I do it
Took away my permit-- And I say, "There's nothin' to it!
The worst punishment I ever endured. You just stand there lookin' cute,
It turns out there was a reason: And when something moves, you shoot."
Cows were out of season, and And there's ten stuffed heads
One of the hunters wasn't insured. In my trophy room right now:
Two game wardens, seven hunters,
And a pure-bred guernsey cow.
-- Tom Lehrer, "The Hunting Song"

I can see him a'comin'
With his big boots on,
With his big thumb out,
He wants to get me.
He wants to hurt me.
He wants to bring me down.
But some time later,
When I feel a little straighter,
I'll come across a stranger
Who'll remind me of the danger,
And then.... I'll run him over.
Pretty smart on my part!
To find my way... In the dark!
-- Phil Ochs

I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
-- Pete Seeger

I had an errand there: gathering water-lilies,
green leaves and lilies white to please my pretty lady,
the last ere the year's end to keep them from the winter,
to flower by her pretty feet till the snows are melted.

Each year at summer's end I go to find them for her,
in a wide pool, deep and clear, far down Withywindle;
there they open first in spring and there they linger latest.

By that pool long ago I found the River-daughter,
fair young Goldberry sitting in the rushes.
Sweet was her singing then, and her heart was beating!

And that proved well for you--for now I shall no longer
go down deep again along the forest-water,
no while the year is old. Nor shall I be passing
Old Man Willow's house this side of spring-time,
not till the merry spring, when the River-daughter
dances down the withy-path to bathe in the water.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller, like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.
-- R.L. Stevenson

I have lots of things in my pockets;
None of them is worth anything.
Sociopolitical whines aside,
Gan you give me, gratis, free,
The price of half a gallonOf Gallo extra bad
And most of the bus fare home.

I have no doubt the Devil grins,
As seas of ink I spatter.
Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins--
The other kind don't matter.
-- Robert W. Service

I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, "Perdition!
Up from out of under there."

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, "What should he come
Up from out of under for?"
-- Morris Bishop

Well, I met a girl, West Hollywood,
Well, I ain't naming names.
But she really worked me over good,
She was just like Jesse James.
She really worked me over good,
She was a credit to her gender.
She put me through some changes, boy,
Sort of like a Waring blender. [chorus]

I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar,
She asked me if I'd beat her.
She took me back to the Hyatt House,
I don't want to talk about it. [chorus]
-- Warren Zevon, "Poor Poor Pitiful Me"

I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah
Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda
S-O-D-A soda
I saw the little runt sitting there on a log
I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said Yoda
Y-O-D-A Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda

Well I've been around but I ain't never seen
A guy who looks like a Muppet but he's wrinkled and green
Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda
Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand
How he can raise me in the air just by raising his hand
Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda
-- Weird Al Yankovic, "The Star Wars Song," to the tune of
"Lola" by the Kinks

I sent a letter to the fish, I said it very loud and clear,
I told them, "This is what I wish." I went and shouted in his ear.
The little fishes of the sea, But he was very stiff and proud,
They sent an answer back to me. He said "You needn't shout so loud."
The little fishes' answer was And he was very proud and stiff,
"We cannot do it, sir, because..." He said "I'll go and wake them if..."
I sent a letter back to say I took a kettle from the shelf,
It would be better to obey. I went to wake them up myself.
But someone came to me and said But when I found the door was locked
"The little fishes are in bed." I pulled and pushed and kicked and
knocked,
I said to him, and I said it plain And when I found the door was shut,
"Then you must wake them up again." I tried to turn the handle, But...

I sent a message to another time,
But as the days unwind -- this I just can't believe,
I sent a message to another plane,
Maybe it's all a game -- but this I just can't conceive.
...
I met someone who looks at lot like you,
She does the things you do, but she is an IBM.
She's only programmed to be very nice,
But she's as cold as ice, whenever I get too near,
She tells me that she likes me very much,
But when I try to touch, she makes it all too clear.
...
I realize that it must seem so strange,
That time has rearranged, but time has the final word,
She knows I think of you, she reads my mind,
She tries to be unkind, she knows nothing of our world.
-- ELO, "Yours Truly, 2095"

I stood on the leading edge,
The eastern seaboard at my feet.
"Jump!" said Yoko Ono
I'm too scared and good-looking, I cried.
Go on and give it a try,
Why prolong the agony, all men must die.
-- Roger Waters, "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking"

I think that I shall never see
A thing as lovely as a tree.
But as you see the trees have gone
They went this morning with the dawn.
A logging firm from out of town
Came and chopped the trees all down.
But I will trick those dirty skunks
And write a brand new poem called 'Trunks'.

"I thought that you said you were 20 years old!"
"As a programmer, yes," she replied,
"And you claimed to be very near two meters tall!"
"You said you were blonde, but you lied!"
Oh, she was a hacker and he was one, too,
They had so much in common, you'd say.
They exchanged jokes and poems, and clever new hacks,
And prompts that were cute or risque'.
He sent her a picture of his brother Sam,
She sent one from some past high school day,
And it might have gone on for the rest of their lives,
If they hadn't met in L.A.
"Your beard is an armpit," she said in disgust.
He answered, "Your armpit's a beard!"
And they chorused: "I think I could stand all the rest
If you were not so totally weird!"
If she had not said what he wanted to hear,
And he had not done just the same,
They'd have been far more honest, and never have met,
And would not have had fun with the game.
-- Judith Schrier, "Face to Face After Six Months of
Electronic Mail"

I used to be such a sweet sweet thing, 'til they got a hold of me,
I opened doors for little old ladies, I helped the blind to see,
I got no friends 'cause they read the papers, they can't be seen,
With me, and I'm feelin' real shot down,
And I'm, uh, feelin' mean,
No more, Mr. Nice Guy,
No more, Mr. Clean,
No more, Mr. Nice Guy,
They say "He's sick, he's obscene".

My dog bit me on the leg today, my cat clawed my eyes,
Ma's been thrown out of the social circle, and Dad has to hide,
I went to church, incognito, when everybody rose,
The reverend Smithy, he recognized me,
And punched me in the nose, he said,
(chorus)
He said "You're sick, you're obscene".
-- Alice Cooper, "No More Mr. Nice Guy"

I was born in a barrel of butcher knives
Trouble I love and peace I despise
Wild horses kicked me in my side
Then a rattlesnake bit me and he walked off and died.
-- Bo Diddley

I went home with a waitress,
The way I always do.
How I was I to know?
She was with the Russians too.

I was gambling in Havana,
I took a little risk.
Send lawyers, guns, and money,
Dad, get me out of this.
-- Warren Zevon, "Lawyers, Guns and Money"

I went over to my friend, he was eatin' a pickle.
I said "Hi, what's happenin'?"
He said "Nothin'."
Try to sing this song with that kind of enthusiasm;
As if you just squashed a cop.
-- Arlo Guthrie, "Motorcycle Song"

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
-- Shel Silverstein, "Hug o' War"

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

I'll see you... on the dark side of the moon...
-- Pink Floyd

I'm an artist.
But it's not what I really want to do.
What I really want to do is be a shoe salesman.
I know what you're going to say --
"Dreamer! Get your head out of the clouds."
All right! But it's what I want to do.
Instead I have to go on painting all day long.

The world should make a place for shoe salesmen.
-- J. Feiffer

I'm free -- and freedom tastes of reality.
-- The Who

I'm So Miserable Without You It's Almost Like Having You Here
-- Song title by Stephen Bishop.

She Got the Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft
-- Song title by Jerry Reed.

When My Love Comes Back from the Ladies' Room Will I Be Too Old to Care?
-- Song title by Lewis Grizzard.

Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life
-- Unattributed song title.

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus,
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous;
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
-- Gilbert & Sullivan, "Pirates of Penzance"

I've built a better model than the one at Data General
For data bases vegetable, animal, and mineral
My OS handles CPUs with multiplexed duality;
My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality.
My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity,
You never have to bother checking out a bit for parity;
There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting;
My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting.

I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point:
There's lots of room in memory for variables floating-point,
Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.

If a system is administered wisely,
its users will be content.
They enjoy hacking their code
and don't waste time implementing
labor-saving shell scripts.
Since they dearly love their accounts,
they aren't interested in other machines.
There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp,
but these don't access any hosts.
There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy reading their mail,
take pleasure in being with their newsgroups,
spend weekends working at their terminals,
delight in the doings at the site.
And even though the next system is so close
that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.

If all the seas were ink,
And all the reeds were pens,
And all the skies were parchment,
And all the men could write,
These would not suffice
To write down all the red tapeOf this Government.

If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer.....

Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

You can't say this? What a shame, sir!
We'll find you another game, sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

-- DementDJ@ccip.perkin-elmer.com (DementDJ) [rec.humor.funny]

If I could read your mind, love,
What a tale your thoughts could tell,
Just like a paperback novel,
The kind the drugstore sells,
When you reach the part where the heartaches come,
The hero would be me,
Heroes often fail,
You won't read that book again, because
the ending is just too hard to take.

I walk away, like a movie star,
Who gets burned in a three way script,
Enter number two,
A movie queen to play the sceneOf bringing all the good things out in me,
But for now, love, let's be real
I never thought I could act this way,
And I've got to say that I just don't get it,
I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling is gone
And I just can't get it back...
-- Gordon Lightfoot, "If You Could Read My Mind"

If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
-- Bert Whitney

If researchers wrote nursery rhymes...

Little Miss Muffet sat on her gluteal region,
Eating components of soured milk.
On at least one occasion,
along came an arachnid and sat down beside her,
Or at least in her vicinity,
And caused her to feel an overwhelming, but not paralyzing, fear,
Which motivated the patient to leave the area rather quickly.
-- Ann Melugin Williams

If you had just a minute to breathe,
And they granted you one final wish,
Would you ask for something
Like another chance?
-- Traffic, "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys"

If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker,
It is slick to stick a lock upon your stock.
Or some joker who is slicker,
Will trick you of your liquor,
If you fail to lock your liquor with a lock.

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.
Find the fun and snap! The job's a game.
And every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake,
a lark, a spree; it's very clear to see.
-- Mary Poppins

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

In the dimestores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall.
-- Bob Dylan

In the land of the dark the Ship of the
Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead.
-- Egyptian Book of the Dead

In this valeOf toil and sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin.
-- Burma Shave

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forest ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
-- S.T. Coleridge, "Kubla Kahn"

It hangs down from the chandelier
Nobody knows quite what it does
Its color is odd and its shape is weird
It emits a high-sounding buzz

It grows a couple of feet each day
and wriggles with sort of a twitch
Nobody bugs it 'cause it comes from
a visiting uncle who's rich!
-- To "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear"

It's gonna be alright,
It's almost midnight,
And I've got two more bottles of wine.

It's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon.
-- Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"

It's so confusing choosing sides in the heat of the moment,
just to see if it's real,
Oooh, it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel,
But I'm avoiding all the hard cold facts that I got to face,
So ask me just one question when this magic night is through,
Could it have been just anyone or did it have to be you?
-- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses"

Just a song before I go, Going through security
To whom it may concern, I held her for so long.
Traveling twice the speed of sound She finally looked at me in love,
It's easy to get burned. And she was gone.
When the shows were over Just a song before I go,
We had to get back home, A lesson to be learned.
And when we opened up the door Traveling twice the speed of sound
I had to be alone. It's easy to get burned.
She helped me with my suitcase,
She stands before my eyes,
Driving me to the airport
And to the friendly skies.
-- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Just a Song Before I Go"

`Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

'Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.'

`Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

`Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.'

Knock Knock... (who's there?) Ether! (ether who?) Ether Bunny... Yea!
[chorus]
Yeay!
Stay on the Happy side, always on the happy side,
Stay on the Happy side of life!
Bum bum bum bum bum bum
You will feel no pain, as we drive you insane,
So Stay on the Happy Side of life!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps,
Cross-eyed mosquitos and bowlegged ants,
I come before you to stand behind you
To tell you of something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday (which is good Friday),
There will be a convention held in the
Women's Club which is strictly for Men.
Admission is free, pay at the door,
Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
It was a summer's day in winter,
And the snow was raining fast,
As a barefoot boy with shoes on,
Stood sitting in the grass.
Oh, that bright day in the dead of night,
Two dead men got up to fight.
Three blind men to see fair play,
Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"!
Back to back, they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and arrested those two dead boys.

Ladles and Jellyspoons!
I come before you to stand behind you,
To tell you something I know nothing about.
Since next Thursday will be Good Friday,
There will be a fathers' meeting, for mothers only.
Wear your best clothes, if you don't have any,
And please stay at home if you can possibly be there.
Admission is free, please pay at the door.
Have a seat on me: please sit on the floor.
No matter where you manage to sit,
The man in the balcony will certainly spit.
We thank you for your unkind attention,
And would now like to present our next act:
"The Four Corners of the Round Table."

Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one...
Lady, lady, better run!
-- Dorothy Parker, "Social Note"

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Let us go then you and I
while the night is laid out against the sky
like a smear of mustard on an old pork pie.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreatsOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
-- T.S. Eliot, "Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Life is like a tin of sardines.
We're, all of us, looking for the key.
-- Beyond the Fringe

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has bought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
-- James Weldon Johnson

Like corn in a field I cut you down,
I threw the last punch way too hard,
After years of going steady, well, I thought it was time,
To throw in my hand for a new set of cards.
And I can't take you dancing out on the weekend,
I figured we'd painted too much of this town,
And I tried not to look as I walked to my wagon,
And I knew then I had lost what should have been found,
I knew then I had lost what should have been found.
And I feel like a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford
I'm as low as a paid assassin is
You know I'm cold as a hired sword.
I'm so ashamed we can't patch it up,
You know I can't think straight no more
You make me feel like a bullet, honey,
a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford.
-- Elton John "I Feel Like a Bullet"

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play If thought is life
My thoughtless hand And strength & breath,
Has brush'd away. And the wantOf thought is death,
Am not I
A fly like thee? Then am I
Or art not thou A happy fly
A man like me? If I live
Or if I die.

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
-- William Blake, "The Fly"

Louie Louie, me gotta go
Louie Louie, me gotta go

Fine little girl she waits for me
Me catch the ship for cross the sea
Me sail the ship all alone Three nights and days me sail the sea
Me never thinks me make it home Me think of girl constantly
(chorus) On the ship I dream she there
I smell the rose in her hair
Me see Jamaica moon above (chorus, guitar solo)
It won't be long, me see my love
I take her in my arms and then
Me tell her I never leave again
-- The real words to The Kingsmen's classic "Louie Louie"

Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart,
seized this one for the fair form
that was taken from me-and the way of it afficts me still.
Love, which absolves no loved one from loving,
seized me so strongly with delight in him,
that, as you see, it does not leave me even now.
Love brought us to one death.
-- La Divina Commedia: Inferno V, vv. 100-06

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man,
You, with your fresh thoughts
Care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name
Sorrow's springs are the same:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Most folks they like the daytime,
'cause they like to see the shining sun.
They're up in the morning,
off and a-running till they're too tired for having fun.
But when the sun goes down,
and the bright lights shine, my daytime has just begun.

Now there are two sides to this great big world,
and one of them is always night.
If you can take care of business in the sunshine, baby,
I guess you're gonna be all right.
Don't come looking for me to lend you a hand.
My eyes just can't stand the light.

'Cause I'm a night owl honey, sleep all day long.
-- Carly Simon

Mummy dust to make me old;
To shroud my clothes, the black of night;
To age my voice, an old hag's cackle;
To whiten my hair, a scream of fright;
A blast of wind to fan my hate;
A thunderbolt to mix it well --
Now begin thy magic spell!
-- Walter Disney, "Snow White"

My analyst told me that I was right out of my head,
But I said, "Dear Doctor, I think that it is you instead.
Because I have got a thing that is unique and new,
To prove it I'll have the last laugh on you.
'Cause instead of one head -- I've got two.

And you know two heads are better than one.

My Bonnie looked into a gas tank,
The height of its contents to see!
She lit a small match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

My calculator is my shepherd, I shall not want
It maketh me accurate to ten significant figures,
and it leadeth me in scientific notation to 99 digits.
It restoreth my square roots and guideth me along paths of floating
decimal points for the sake of precision.
Yea, tho I walk through the valley of surprise quizzes,
I will fear no prof, for my calculator is there to hearten me.
It prepareth a log table to comfort me, it prepareth an
arc sin for me in the presence of my teachers.
It annoints my homework with correct solutions, my interpolations are
over.
Surely, both precision and accuracy shall follow me all the days of my
life, and I shall dwell in the house of Texas instruments forever.

My darling wife was always glum.
I drowned her in a cask of rum,
And so made sure that she would stay
In better spirits night and day.

My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway or the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
-- Dorothy Parker, part 3

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams --
And I wish he were in Asia.
-- Dorothy Parker, part 2

My My, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay The king is gone but he's not forgotten
It's better to burn out This is the story of a Johnny Rotten
Than to fade away It's better to burn out than it is to rust
My my, hey hey The king is gone but he's not forgotten

It's out of the blue and into the black Hey hey, my my
They give you this, but you pay for that Rock and roll can never die
And once you're gone you can never come back There's more to the picture
When you're out of the blue Than meets the eye
And into the black
-- Neil Young
"My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Rust Never Sleeps"

"My name is Sue! How do you do?! Now you gonna die!"
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes,
And he went down, but to my surprise,
Come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
So I busted a chair right across his teeth,
And we crashed through the walls and into the streets,
Kickin' and a-gougin' in the mud and the blood and beer.
Now I tell you, I've fought tougher men,
But I really can't remember when:
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
But I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
And he went for his gun, but I pulled mine first,
And he sat there lookin' at me, and I saw him smile.
He said: "Son, this world is rough,
And if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough,
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help you along.
So I give you that name and I said goodbye,
And I knew you'd have to get tough or die,
And it's that name that's helped to make you strong!
-- Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue"

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled --
Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world --
And I wish I'd never met him.
-- Dorothy Parker, part 1

My pen is at the bottom of a page,
Which, being finished, here the story ends;
'Tis to be wished it had been sooner done,
But stories somehow lengthen when begun.
-- Byron

My soul is crushed, my spirit sore
I do not like me anymore,
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse,
I ponder on the narrow house
I shudder at the thought of men
I'm due to fall in love again.
-- Dorothy Parker, "Enough Rope"

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit,
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains,
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains;
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails;
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away.
-- Alexander Pope (on runtime bounds checking?)

Nine-track tapes and seven-track tapes
And tapes without any tracks;
Stretchy tapes and snarley tapes
And tapes mixed up on the racks --
Take hold of the tape
And pull off the strip,
And then you'll be sure
Your tape drive will skip.
-- Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes

"No program is perfect,"
They said with a shrug.
"The customer's happy--
What's one little bug?"

But he was determined, Then change two, then three more,
The others went home. As year followed year.
He dug out the flow chart And strangers would comment,
Deserted, alone. "Is that guy still here?"

Night passed into morning. He died at the console
The room was cluttered Of hunger and thirst
With core dumps, source listings. Next day he was buried
"I'm close," he muttered. Face down, nine edge first.

Chain smoking, cold coffee, And his wife through her tears
Logic, deduction. Accepted his fate.
"I've got it!" he cried, Said "He's not really gone,
"Just change one instruction." He's just working late."
-- The Perfect Programmer

Nothing that's forced can ever be right,
If it doesn't come naturally, leave it.
That's what she said as she turned out the light,
And we bent our backs as slaves of the night,
Then she lowered her guard and showed me the scars
She got from trying to fight
Saying, oh, you'd better believe it.
[...]
Well nothing that's real is ever for free
And you just have to pay for it sometime.
She said it before, she said it to me,
I suppose she believed there was nothing to see,
But the same old four imaginary walls
She'd built for livin' inside
I said oh, you just can't mean it.
[...]
Well nothing that's forced can ever be right,
If it doesn't come naturally, leave it.
That's what she said as she turned out the light,
And she may have been wrong, and she may have been right,
But I woke with the frost, and noticed she'd lost
The veil that covered her eyes,
I said oh, you can leave it.
-- Al Stewart, "If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It"

Now let the song begin! Let us sing togetherOf sun, star, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leag, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
-- A.E. Housman

Now that day wearies me,
My yearning desire
Will receive more kindly,
Like a tired child, the starry night.

Hands, leave off your deeds,
Mind, forget all thoughts;
All of my forces
Yearn only to sink into sleep.

And my soul, unguarded,
Would soar on widespread wings,
To live in night's magical sphere
More profoundly, more variously.
-- Hermann Hesse, "Going to Sleep"

Now what would they do if I just sailed away?
Who the hell really compelled me to leave today?
Runnin' low on stories of what made it a ball,
What would they do if I made no landfall?"
-- Jimmy Buffet, "Landfall"

Now's the time to have some big ideas
Now's the time to make some firm decisions
We saw the Buddha in a bar down south
Talking politics and nuclear fission
We see him and he's all washed up --
Moving on into the body of a beetle
Getting ready for a long long crawl
He ain't nothing -- he ain't nothing at all...

Death and Money make their point once more
In the shape of Philosophical assassins
Mark and Danny take the bus uptown
Deadly angels for reality and passion
Have the courage of the here and now
Don't taking nothing from the half-baked buddhas
When you think you got it paid in full
You got nothing -- you got nothing at all...
We're on the road and we're gunning for the Buddha.
We know his name and he mustn't get away.
We're on the road and we're gunning for the Buddha.
It would take one shot -- to blow him away...
-- Shriekback, "Gunning for the Buddah"

O love, could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Might we not smash it to bits
And mould it closer to our hearts' desire?
-- Omar Khayyam, tr. FitzGerald

Observe yon plumed biped fine.
To activate its captivation,
Deposit on its termination,
A quantity of particles saline.

Of all the words of witch's doom
There's none so bad as which and whom.
The man who kills both which and whom
Will be enshrined in our Who's Whom.
-- Fletcher Knebel

Oh give me your pity!
I'm on a committee, We attend and amend
Which means that from morning And contend and defend
to night, Without a conclusion in sight.

We confer and concur,
We defer and demur, We revise the agenda
And reiterate all of our thoughts. With frequent addenda
And consider a load of reports.

We compose and propose,
We suppose and oppose, But though various notions
And the points of procedure are fun; Are brought up as motions,
There's terribly little gets done.

We resolve and absolve;
But we never dissolve,
Since it's out of the question for us
To bring our committee
To end like this ditty,
Which stops with a period, thus.
-- Leslie Lipson, "The Committee"

"Oh, 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments such prosperi-ty?"
"Oh, didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

"You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!"
"Yes: That's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

"At home in the barton you said `thee' and `thou,'
And `thik oon' and `theas oon' and `t'other;' but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for compa-ny!"
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

"Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit like as on any la-dy!"
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

"You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!"
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!"
"My dear--a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
--Thomas Hardy

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved. (chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound. (chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench. (chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4! (chorus)

CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
-- to Home on the Range

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirthOf sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --
Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up along delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight"

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
-- Dorothy Parker, "Comment"

Oh, the Slithery Dee, he crawled out of the sea.
He may catch all the others, but he won't catch me.
No, he won't catch me, stupid ol' Slithery Dee.
He may catch all the others, but AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!
-- The Smothers Brothers

Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of livin' is gone.
-- John Cougar, "Jack and Diane"

On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time,
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain.
Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came
In the Year of the Cat.

She doesn't give you time for questions, as she locks up your arm in hers,
And you follow 'till your sense of which direction completely disappears.
By the blue-tiled walls near the market stall there's a hidden door she
leads you to.
These days, she say, I feel my life just like a river running through
The Year of the Cat.

Well, she looks at you so coolly,
And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea.
She comes in incense and patchouli,
So you take her to find what's waiting inside
The Year of the Cat.

Well, morning comes and you're still with her, but the bus and the tourists
are gone,
And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you have to stay on.
But the drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the new-born day.
You know some time you're bound to leave her, but for now you're going to stay
In the Year of the Cat.
-- Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"

On the good ship Enterprise
Every week there's a new surprise
Where the Romulans lurk
And the Klingons often go berserk.

Yes, the good ship Enterprise
There's excitement anywhere it flies
Where Tribbles play
And Nurse Chapel never gets her way.

See Captain Kirk standing on the bridge,
Mr. Spock is at his side.
The weekly menace, ooh-ooh
It gets fried, scattered far and wide.

It's the good ship Enterprise
Heading out where danger lies
And you live in dread
If you're wearing a shirt that's red.
-- Doris Robin and Karen Trimble of The L.A. Filkharmonics,
"The Good Ship Enterprise," to the tune of "The Good Ship Lollipop"

Beware, scant days past the Ides of July.
Impatient hands wait eagerly
to grasp, to hold
scant moments of time
wrested from life in the full
glory of Canon's power;
held captive by his unblinking eye.

Three golden orbs stand watch;
one each to toll the day, hour, minute
until predestiny decrees his reawakening.
When that feared moment arives,
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."
-- "I extended the loan on your Camera, at the Pine
Valley Pawn Shop today"

Once upon this midnight incoherent,
While you pondered sentient and crystalline,
Over many a broken and subordinate
Volume of gnarly lore,
While I pestered, nearly singing,
Sudddenly there came a hewing,
As of someone profusely skulking,
Skulking at my chamber door.

One bright Sunday morning, in the shadows of the steeple,
By the Relief Office, I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling,
This land was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back,
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said: "No Trespassing."
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
-- Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" (verses 4, 6, 7)
[If you ever wondered why Arlo was so anti-establishment when his dad
wrote such wonderful patriotic songs, the answer is that you haven't
heard all of Woody's songs]

One day,
A mad meta-poet,
With nothing to say,
Wrote a mad meta-poem
That started: "One day,
A mad meta-poet,
With nothing to say,
Wrote a mad meta-poem
That started: "One day,
[...]
sort of close".
Were the words that the poet,
Finally chose,
To bring his mad poem,
To some sort of close".
Were the words that the poet,
Finally chose,
To bring his mad poem,
To some sort of close".

One pill makes you larger, And if you go chasing rabbits
And one pill makes you small. And you know you're going to fall.
And the ones that mother gives you, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Don't do anything at all. Has given you the call.
Go ask Alice Call Alice
When she's ten feet tall. When she was just small.

When men on the chessboard When logic and proportion
Get up and tell you where to go. Have fallen sloppy dead,
And you've just had some kind of And the White Knight is talking
mushroom backwards
And your mind is moving low. And the Red Queen's lost her head
Go ask Alice Remember what the dormouse said:
I think she'll know. Feed your head.
Feed your head.
Feed your head.
-- Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee.
-- Tennyson

Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream,
I wonder how the old folks are tonight,
Her name was Ann, and I'll be damned if I recall her face,
She left me not knowing what to do.

Turning back the pages to the times I love best,
I wonder if she'll ever do the same,
Now the thing that I call livin' is just bein' satisfied,
With knowing I got noone left to blame.
Carefree Highway, I got to see you, my old flame...

Searching through the fragments of my dream shattered sleep,
I wonder if the years have closed her mind,
I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin' to get free,
From the good old faithful feelin' we once knew.
-- Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway"

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped: he wept to hear.
-- William Blake, "Songs of Innocence"

Please stand for the National Anthem:

Australians all, let us rejoice,
For we are young and free.
We've golden soil and wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea.
Our land abounds in nature's giftsOf beauty rich and rare.
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

Thank you. You may resume your seat.

Please stand for the National Anthem:

Oh, say can you see by dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Thank you. You may resume your seat.

Proposed Country & Western Song Titles
I Can't Get Over You, So I Get Up and Go Around to the Other Side
If You Won't Leave Me Alone, I'll Find Someone Who Will
I Knew That You'd Committed a Sin When You Came Home Late With
Your Socks Outside-in
I'm a Rabbit in the Headlights of Your Love
Don't Kick My Tires If You Ain't Gonna Take Me For a Ride
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
I Still Miss You, Baby, But My Aim's Gettin' Better
I've Got Red Eyes From Your White Lies and I'm Blue All the Time
-- "Wordplay"

Proposed Country & Western Song Titles
I Don't Mind If You Lie to Me, As Long As I Ain't Lyin' Alone
I Wouldn't Take You to a Dog Fight Even If I Thought You Could Win
If You Leave Me, Walk Out Backwards So I'll Think You're Comin' In
Since You Learned to Lip-Sync, I'm At Your Disposal
My John Deere Was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John Was
Breaking My Heart
Don't Cry, Little Darlin', You're Waterin' My Beer
Tennis Must Be Your Racket, 'Cause Love Means Nothin' to You
When You Say You Love Me, You're Full of Prunes, 'Cause Living
With You Is the Pits
I Wanted Your Hand in Marriage but All I Got Was the Finger
-- "Wordplay"

Proposed Country & Western Song Titles
She Ain't Much to See, but She Looks Good Through the Bottom of a Glass
If Fingerprints Showed Up On Skin, I Wonder Who's I'd Find On You
I'm Ashamed to be Here, but Not Ashamed Enough to Leave
It's Commode Huggin' Time In The Valley
If You Want to Keep the Beer Real Cold, Put It Next to My Ex-wife's Heart
If You Get the Feeling That I Don't Love You, Feel Again
I'm Ashamed To Be Here, But Not Ashamed Enough To Leave
It's the Bottle Against the Bible in the Battle For Daddy's Soul
My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend, And I Sure Miss Him
Don't Cut Any More Wood, Baby, 'Cause I'll Be Comin' Home With A Load
I Loved Her Face, But I Left Her Behind For You

Try his first wife's maiden name,
This is more than just a game.
It's real fun, but just the same,
It's hacking, hacking, hacking.
-- To the tune of "Music, Music, Music?"

Reach into the thoughts of friends,
And find they do not know your name.
Squeeze the teddy bear too tight,
And watch the feathers burst the seams.
Touch the stained glass with your cheek,
And feel its chill upon your blood.
Hold a candle to the night,
And see the darkness bend the flame.
Tear the mask of peace from God,
And hear the roar of souls in hell.
Pluck a rose in name of love,
And watch the petals curl and wilt.
Lean upon the western wind,
And know you are alone.
-- Dru Mims

Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
-- William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

Remove me from this land of slaves,
Where all are fools, and all are knaves,
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for nought;
-- Jonathan Swift

Roland was a warrior, from the land of the midnight sun,
With a Thompson gun for hire, fighting to be done.
The deal was made in Denmark, on a dark and stormy day,
So he set out for Biafra, to join the bloody fray.
Through sixty-six and seven, they fought the Congo war,
With their fingers on their triggers, knee deep in gore.
Days and nights they battled, the Bantu to their knees,
They killed to earn their living, and to help out the Congolese.
Roland the Thompson gunner...
His comrades fought beside him, Van Owen and the rest,
But of all the Thompson gunners, Roland was the best.
So the C.I.A decided, they wanted Roland dead,
That son-of-a-bitch Van Owen, blew off Roland's head.
Roland the headless Thompson gunner...
Roland searched the continent, for the man who'd done him in.
He found him in Mombasa, in a bar room drinking gin,
Roland aimed his Thompson gun, he didn't say a word,
But he blew Van Owen's body from there to Johannesburg.
The eternal Thompson gunner, still wandering through the night,
Now it's ten years later, but he stills keeps up the fight.
In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Berkeley,
Patty Hearst... heard the burst... of Roland's Thompson gun, and bought it.
-- Warren Zevon, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner"

Say! You've struck a heap of trouble--
Bust in business, lost your wife;
No one cares a cent about you,
You don't care a cent for life;
Hard luck has of hope bereft you,
Health is failing, wish you'd die--
Why, you've still the sunshine left you
And the big blue sky.
-- R.W. Service

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
-- Edgar Allen Poe, "Science, a Sonnet"

Scratch the disks, dump the core, Shut it down, pull the plug
Roll the tapes across the floor, Give the core an extra tug
And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash.
Teletypes smashed to bits. Mem'ry cards, one and all,
Give the scopes some nasty hits Toss out halfway down the hall
And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash.
And we've also found Just flip one switch
When you turn the power down, And the lights will cease to twitch
You turn the disk readers into trash. And the tape drives will crumble
in a flash.
Oh, it's so much fun, When the CPU
Now the CPU won't run Can print nothing out but "foo,"
And the system is going to crash. The system is going to crash.
-- To the tune of "As the Caissons go Rolling Along"

She can kill all your files;
She can freeze with a frown.
And a wave of her hand brings the whole system down.
And she works on her code until ten after three.
She lives like a bat but she's always a hacker to me.
-- Apologies to Billy Joel

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Sea!
O Light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
In a far land beyond the Sea.

O stars that in the Sunless Year
With shining hand by her were sown,
In windy fields now bright and clear
We see you silver blossom blown!

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western Seas.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Some of them want to use you,
Some of them want to be used by you,
...Everybody's looking for something.
-- Eurythmics

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

Speak roughly to your little VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
It knows that one cannot relax
Because the paging thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!

I speak severely to my VAX,
And boot it when it crashes;
In spite of all my favorite hacks
My jobs it always thrashes!
Wow! Wow! Wow!

Speaking of Godzilla and other things that convey horror:

With a purposeful grimace and a Mongo-like flair
He throws the spinning disk drives in the air!
And he picks up a Vax and he throws it back down
As he wades through the lab making terrible sounds!
Helpless users with projects due
Scream "My God!" as he stomps on the tape drives, too!

Strange things are done to be number one
In selling the computer The Druids were entrepreneurs,
IBM has their strategem And they built a granite box
Which steadily grows acuter, It tracked the moon, warned of monsoons,
And Honeywell competes like Hell, And forecast the equinox
But the story's missing link Their price was right, their future
Is the system old at Stonemenge sold bright,
By the firm of Druids, Inc. The prototype was sold;
From Stonehenge site their bits and byte
Would ship for Celtic gold.
The movers came to crate the frame;
It weighed a million ton!
The traffic folk thought it a joke The man spoke true, and thus to you
(the wagon wheels just spun); A warning from the ages;
"They'll nay sell that," the foreman Your stock will slip if you can't ship
spat, What's in your brochure's pages.
"Just leave the wild weeds grow; See if it sells without the bells
"It's Druid-kind, over-designed, And strings that ring and quiver;
"And belly up they'll go." Druid repute went down the chute
Because they couldn't deliver.
-- Edward C. McManus, "The Computer at Stonehenge"

When your client's hopping mad,
Put his picture in the ad.
If he still should prove refractory,
Add a picture of his factory.

The all-softening overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul, -- the dinner bell.
-- Lord Byron

The bank called to tell me that I'm overdrawn,
Some freaks are burning crosses out on my front lawn,
And I *can't*believe* it, all the Cheetos are gone,
It's just ONE OF THOSE DAYS!
-- Weird Al Yankovic, "One of Those Days"

The bank sent our statement this morning,
The red ink was a sight of great awe!
Their figures and mine might have balanced,
But my wife was too quick on the draw.

The Bird of Time has but a little way to fly ...
and the bird is on the wing.
-- Omar Khayyam

The carbonyl is polarized,
The delta end is plus.
The nucleophile will thus attack,
The carbon nucleus.
Addition makes an alcohol,Of types there are but three.
It makes a bond, to correspond,
From C to shining C.
-- Prof. Frank Westheimer, to "America the Beautiful"

The common cormorant, or shag,
Lays eggs inside a paper bag;
The reason, you will see, no doubt,
Is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have failed to notice is that herdsOf bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

The eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the livelong day;
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away;
Do not think you can escape them
From night 'til early in the morn;
The eyes of Texas are upon you
'Til Gabriel blows his horn.
-- University of Texas' school song

The garden is in mourning;
The rain falls cool among the flowers.
Summer shivers quietly
On its way towards its end.

Golden leaf after leaf
Falls from the tall acacia.
Summer smiles, astonished, feeble,
In this dying dream of a garden.

For a long while, yet, in the roses,
She will linger on, yearning for peace,
And slowly
Close her weary eyes.
-- Hermann Hesse, "September"

The good (I am convinced, for one)
Is but the bad one leaves undone.
Once your reputation's done
You can live a life of fun.
-- Wilhelm Busch

The good time is approaching,
The season is at hand.
When the merry click of the two-base lick
Will be heard throughout the land.
The frost still lingers on the earth, and
Budless are the trees.
But the merry ring of the voice of spring
Is borne upon the breeze.
-- Ode to Opening Day, "The Sporting News", 1886

The Junior God now heads the roll
In the list of heaven's peers;
He sits in the House of High Control,
And he regulates the spheres.
Yet does he wonder, do you suppose,
If, even in gods divine,
The best and wisest may not be those
Who have wallowed awhile with the swine?
-- Robert W. Service

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seenOf stars in shadow shimmering.
Tin'uviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.

There Beren came from mountains colds,
And lost he wandered under leaves,
And where the Elven-river rolled
He walked alone and sorrowing.
He peered between the hemlock-leaves
And saw in wonder flowers of gold
Upon her mantle and her sleeves,
And her hair like shadow following.

Enchantment healed his weary feet
That over hills were doomed to roam;
And forth he hastened, strong and fleet,
And grasped at moonbeams glistening.
Through woven woods in Elvenhome
She lightly fled on dancing feet,
And left him lonely still to roam
In the silent forest listening.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord and I are in a sheep-shepherd relationship, and I am in
a position of negative need.
He prostrates me in a green-belt grazing area.
He conducts me directionally parallel to non-torrential aqueous
liquid.
He returns to original satisfaction levels my psychological makeup.
He switches me on to a positive behavioral format for maximal
prestige of His identity.
It should indeed be said that notwithstanding the fact that I make
ambulatory progress through the umbragious inter-hill mortality slot, terror
sensations will no be initiated in me, due to para-etical phenomena.
Your pastoral walking aid and quadrupic pickup unit introduce me
into a pleasurific mood state.
You design and produce a nutriment-bearing furniture-type structure
in the context of non-cooperative elements.
You act out a head-related folk ritual employing vegetable extract.
My beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis.
It is an ongoing deductible fact that your inter-relational
empathetical and non-ventious capabilities will retain me as their
target-focus for the duration of my non-death period, and I will possess
tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanent, open-ended
time basis.

The morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age,
But that don't bother me none; in my eyes you're everything.
I know I keep you amused,
But I feel I'm being used.
Oh, Maggie, I wish I'd never seen your face.

You took me away from home,
Just to save you from being alone;
You stole my heart, and that's what really hurts.

I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school,
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool,
Or find myself a rock 'n' roll band,
That needs a helping hand,
Oh, Maggie I wish I'd never seen your face.

You made a first-class fool out of me,
But I'm as blind as a fool can be.
You stole my soul, and that's a pain I can do without.
-- Rod Stewart, "Maggie May"

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all they Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The net of law is spread so wide,
No sinner from its sweep may hide.
Its meshes are so fine and strong,
They take in every child of wrong.
O wondrous web of mystery!
Big fish alone escape from thee!
-- James Jeffrey Roche

The Pig, if I am not mistaken,
Gives us ham and pork and Bacon.
Let others think his heart is big,
I think it stupid of the Pig.
-- Ogden Nash

The Poet Whose Badness Saved His Life
The most important poet in the seventeenth century was George
Wither. Alexander Pope called him "wretched Wither" and Dryden said of his
verse that "if they rhymed and rattled all was well".
In our own time, "The Dictionary of National Biography" notes that his
work "is mainly remarkable for its mass, fluidity and flatness. It usually
lacks any genuine literary quality and often sinks into imbecile doggerel".
High praise, indeed, and it may tempt you to savour a typically
rewarding stanza: It is taken from "I loved a lass" and is concerned with
the higher emotions.
She would me "Honey" call,
She'd -- O she'd kiss me too.
But now alas! She's left me
Falero, lero, loo.
Among other details of his mistress which he chose to immortalize
was her prudent choice of footwear.
The fives did fit her shoe.
In 1639 the great poet's life was endangered after his capture by
the Royalists during the English Civil War. When Sir John Denham, the
Royalist poet, heard of Wither's imminent execution, he went to the King and
begged that his life be spared. When asked his reason, Sir John replied,
"Because that so long as Wither lived, Denham would not be accounted the
worst poet in England."
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

The Preacher, the Politician, the Teacher,
Were each of them once a kiddie.
A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature.
Do I want one? God Forbiddie!
-- Ogden Nash

The Rabbits The Cow
Here is a verse about rabbits The cow is of the bovine ilk;
That doesn't mention their habits. One end is moo, the other, milk.
-- Ogden Nash

The sounds of the nouns are mostly unbound.
In town a noun might wear a gown,
or further down, might dress a clown.
A noun that's sound would never clown,
but unsound nouns jump up and down.
The sound of a noun could distrub the plowing,
and then, my dear, you'd be put in the pound.
But please don't let that get you down,
the renown of your gown is the talk of the town.
-- A. Nonnie Mouse

The street preacher looked so baffled
When I asked him why he dressed
With forty pounds of headlines
Stapled to his chest.
But he cursed me when I proved to him
I said, "Not even you can hide.
You see, you're just like me.
I hope you're satisfied."
-- Bob Dylan

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was very odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
-- Ogden Nash

The wind doth taste so bitter sweet,
Like Jaspar wine and sugar,
It must have blown through someone's feet,
Like those of Caspar Weinberger.
-- P. Opus

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.
-- "The Wombat"

The Worst American Poet
Julia Moore, "the Sweet Singer of Michigan" (1847-1920) was so bad that
Mark Twain said her first book gave him joy for 20 years.
Her verse was mainly concerned with violent death -- the great fireof Chicago and the yellow fever epidemic proved natural subjects for her pen.
Whether death was by drowning, by fits or by runaway sleigh, the
formula was the same:
Have you heard of the dreadful fateOf Mr. P.P. Bliss and wife?Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life
(in the) Ashbula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died.
Even if you started out reasonably healthy in one of Julia's poems,
the chances are that after a few stanzas you would be at the bottom of a
river or struck by lightning. A critic of the day said she was "worse than
a Gatling gun" and in one slim volume counted 21 killed and 9 wounded.
Incredibly, some newspapers were critical of her work, even
suggesting that the sweet singer was "semi-literate". Her reply was
forthright: "The Editors that has spoken in this scandalous manner have went
beyond reason." She added that "literary work is very difficult to do".
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

The Worst Lines of Verse
For a start, we can rule out James Grainger's promising line:
"Come, muse, let us sing of rats."
Grainger (1721-67) did not have the courage of his convictions and deleted
these words on discovering that his listeners dissolved into spontaneous
laughter the instant they were read out.
No such reluctance afflicted Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) who was
inspired by the subject of war.
"Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away,
And the grey roof reddened and rang;
Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay
The tip of my ear. Flash! bang!"
By contrast, Cheshire cheese provoked John Armstrong (1709-79):
"... that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk..."
While John Bidlake was guided by a compassion for vegetables:
"The sluggard carrot sleeps his day in bed,
The crippled pea alone that cannot stand."
George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote:
"And I was ask'd and authorized to go
To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."
William Balmford explored the possibilities of religious verse:
"So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak
While in this world, are liable to leak."
And William Wordsworth showed that he could do it if he really tried when
describing a pond:
"I've measured it from side to side;
Tis three feet long and two feet wide."
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

Then here's to the City of Boston,
The town of the cries and the groans.
Where the Cabots can't see the Kabotschniks,
And the Lowells won't speak to the Cohns.
-- Franklin Pierce Adams

There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed.
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still recall.
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I've loved them all.

But of all these friends and lovers,
There is no one compared with you,
All these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I'll love you more.
-- Lennon/McCartney, "In My Life", 1965

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
-- Robert W. Service

There is in certain living souls
A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
There is one lonelier than you.

There is no point in waiting.
The train stopped running years ago.
All the schedules, the brochures,
The bright-colored posters full of lies,
Promise rides to a distant country
That no longer exists.

There is something in the pang of change
More than the heart can bear,
Unhappiness remembering happiness.
-- Euripides

There once was a Sailor who looked through a glass
And spied a fair mermaid with scales on her... island.
Where seagulls flew over their nest.
She combed the long hair which hung over her... shoulders.
And caused her to tickle and itch.
The sailor cried out "There's a beautiful... mermaid.
A sittin' out there on the rocks."
The crew came a running, all grabbing their... glasses.
And crowded four deep to the rail.
All eager to share in this fine piece of... news.
...
"Throw out a line and we'll lasso her... flippers.
And soon we will certainly find
If mermaids are better before or be... brave
My dear fellows," The captain cried out.
And cursing with spleen.
This song may be dull, but it's certainly clean.
-- "The Clean Song", Oscar Brandt

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good
And when she was bad, she was very, very popular.
-- Max Miller, "The Max Miller Blue Book"

There's a thrill in store for all for we're about to toast
The corporation that we represent.
We're here to cheer each pioneer and also proudly boast,Of that man of men our sterling president
The name of T.J. Watson means
A courage none can stem
And we feel honored to be here to toast the IBM.
-- Ever Onward, from the 1940 IBM Songbook

There's amnesia in a hangknot,
And comfort in the ax,
But the simple way of poison will make your nerves relax.
There's surcease in a gunshot,
And sleep that comes from racks,
But a handy draft of poison avoids the harshest tax.
You find rest on the hot squat,
Or gas can give you pax,
But the closest corner chemist has peace in packaged stacks.
There's refuge in the church lot
When you tire of facing facts,
And the smoothest route is poison prescribed by kindly quacks.
Chorus: With an *ugh!* and a groan, and a kick of the heels,
Death comes quiet, or it comes with squeals --
But the pleasantest place to find your end
Is a cup of cheer from the hand of a friend.
-- Jubal Harshaw, "One For The Road"

There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle --
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
-- Dorothy Parker

They told me you had proven it When they discovered our results
About a month before. Their hair began to curl
The proof was valid, more or less Instead of understanding it
But rather less than more. We'd run the thing through PRL.

He sent them word that we would try Don't tell a soul about all this
To pass where they had failed For it must ever be
And after we were done, to them A secret, kept from all the rest
The new proof would be mailed. Between yourself and me.

My notion was to start again
Ignoring all they'd done
We quickly turned it into code
To see if it would run.

Thinks't thou existence doth depend on time?
It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine
Have made my days and nights imperishable,
Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore,
Innumerable atoms; and one desert,
Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break,
But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,
Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.

This here's the wattle,
The emblem of our land.
You can stick it in a bottle;
You can hold it in your hand.
Amen!
-- Monty Python

This is the story of the bee
Whose sex is very hard to see

You cannot tell the he from the she
But she can tell, and so can he

The little bee is never still
She has no time to take the pill

And that is why, in times like these
There are so many sons of bees.

Those who sweat in flames of hell, Leaden eared, some thought their bowels
Here's the reason that they fell: Lispeth forth the sweetest vowels.
While on earth they prayed in SAS, These they offered up in praise
PL/1, or other crass, Thinking all this fetid haze
Vulgar tongue. A rapsody sung.

Some the lord did sorely try Jabber of the mindless horde
Assembling all their pleas in hex. Sequel next did mock the lord
Speech as crabbed as devil's crable Slothful sequel so enfangled
Hex that marked on Tower Babel Its speaker's lips became entangled
The highest rung. In his bung.

Because in life they prayed so ill
And offered god such swinish swill
Now they sweat in flames of hell
Sweat from lack of APL
Sweat dung!

Though I respect that a lot
I'd be fired if that were my job
After killing Jason off and
Countless screaming argonauts

Bluebird of friendliness
Like guardian angels it's
Always near

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
Who watches over you
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
Not to put too fine a point on it
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
-- "Birdhouse in your Soul", They Might Be Giants

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine And then one day you find
Staying home to watch the rain Ten years have got behind you
You are young and life is long No one told you when to run
And there is time to kill today You missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter Hanging on in quiet desperation
is the English way
Never seem to find the time The time is gone, the song is over
Plans that either come to nought Thought I'd something more to say...
Or half a page of scribbled lines
-- Pink Floyd, "Time"

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.
-- The Books of Bokonon

'Tis the dream of each programmer,
Before his life is done,
To write three lines of APL,
And make the damn things run.

To code the impossible code, This is my quest --
To bring up a virgin machine, To debug that code,
To pop out of endless recursion, No matter how hopeless,
To grok what appears on the screen, No matter the load,
To write those routines
To right the unrightable bug, Without question or pause,
To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To be willing to hack FORTRAN IV
To mount the unmountable magtape, For a heavenly cause.
To stop the unstoppable crash! And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest,
And the queue will be better for this, That my code will run CUSPy and calm,
That one man, scorned and When it's put to the test.
destined to lose,
Still strove with his last allocation
To scrap the unscrappable kludge!
-- To "The Impossible Dream", from Man of La Mancha

To everything there is a season, a time for every pupose under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-9

Tobacco is a filthy weed,
That from the devil does proceed;
It drains your purse, it burns your clothes,
And makes a chimney of your nose.
-- B. Waterhouse

Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And munched and mumbled a bare old bone;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by! Gum by!
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.

Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Said he to Troll: "Pray, what is youn?
For it looks like the shin o' my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin in graveyard.
Caveyard! Paveyard!
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin' in graveyard."

"My lad," said Troll, "this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o' lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Thinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll
For he don't need his shinbone."

Said Tom: "I don't see why the likes o' thee
Without axin' leave should go makin' free
With the shank or the shin o' my father's kin;
So hand the old bone over!
Rover! Trover!
Though dead he be, it belongs to he;
So hand the old bnone over!"
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

"Twas bergen and the eirie road
Did mahwah into patterson: "Beware the Hopatcong, my son!
All jersey were the ocean groves, The teeth that bite, the nails
And the red bank bayonne. that claw!
Beware the bound brook bird, and shun
He took his belmar blade in hand: The kearney communipaw."
Long time the folsom foe he sought
Till rested he by a bayway tree And, as in nutley thought he stood,
And stood a while in thought. The Hopatcong with eyes of flame,
Came whippany through the englewood,
One, two, one, two, and through And garfield as it came.
and through
The belmar blade went hackensack! "And hast thou slain the Hopatcong?
He left it dead and with it's head Come to my arms, my perth amboy!
He went weehawken back. Hohokus day! Soho! Rahway!"
He caldwell in his joy.
Did mahwah into patterson:
All jersey were the ocean groves,
And the red bank bayonne.
-- Paul Kieffer

'Twas bullig, and the slithy brokers
Did buy and gamble in the craze "Beware the Jabberstock, my son!
All rosy were the Dow Jones stokers The cost that bites, the worth
By market's wrath unphased. that falls!
Beware the Econ'mist's word, and shun
He took his forecast sword in hand: The spurious Street o' Walls!"
Long time the Boesk'some foe he sought -
Sake's liquidity, so d'vested he, And as in bearish thought he stood
And stood awhile in thought. The Jabberstock, with clothes of tweed,
Came waffling with the truth too good,
Chip Black! Chip Blue! And through And yuppied great with greed!
and through
The forecast blade went snicker-snack! "And hast thou slain the Jabberstock?
It bit the dirt, and with its shirt, Come to my firm, V.P.ish boy!
He went rebounding back. O big bucks day! Moolah! Good Play!"
He bought him a Mercedes Toy.
'Twas panic, and the slithy brokers
Did gyre and tumble in the Crash
All flimsy were the Dow Jones stokers
And mammon's wrath them bash!
-- Peter Stucki, "Jabberstocky"

Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes
Did logzerneg the ifthen block
All kludgy were the function flows
And subroutines adhoc.

Beware the runtime-bug my friend
squrooneg, the false goto
Beware the infiniteloop
And shun the inprectoo.
-- "OUTCONERR," to the scheme of "Jabberwocky"

'Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house,
Not a program was working not even a browse.
The programmers were wrung out too mindless to care,
Knowing chances of cutover hadn't a prayer.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of inquiries danced in their heads.
When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my tube to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a Super Programmer, oblivious to fear.
More rapid than eagles, his programs they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name;
On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete!
On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete!
His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean,
From Weekends and nights in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread...
-- "Twas the Night before Crisis"

'Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period
preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, And
throughout our place of residence,
Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the
possessors of this potential, including that
species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus.
Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward
edge of the woodburning caloric apparatus,
Pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an
imminent visitation from an eccentric
philanthropist among whose folkloric appelations
is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ...

Two men looked out from the prison bars,
One saw mud--
The other saw stars.

Now let me get this right: two prisoners are looking out the window.
While one of them was looking at all the mud -- the other one got hit
in the head.

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright Where the hammer? Where the chain?
In the forests of the night, In what furnace was thy brain?
What immortal hand or eye What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

Burnt in distant deeps or skies When the stars threw down their spears
The cruel fire of thine eyes? And water'd heaven with their tears
On what wings dare he aspire? Dare he laugh his work to see?
What the hand dare seize the fire? Dare he who made the lamb make thee?

And what shoulder & what art Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
Could twist the sinews of they heart? In the forests of the night,
And when thy heart began to beat What immortal hand or eye
What dread hand & what dread feet Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Could fetch it from the furnace deep
And in thy horrid ribs dare steep
In the well of sanguine woe?
In what clay & in what mould
Were thy eyes of fury roll'd?
-- William Blake, "The Tyger"

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone. Still round the corner there may wait
Tree and flower and leaf and grass, A new road or a secret gate,
Let them pass! Let them pass! And though we pass them by today
Hill and water under sky, Tomorrow we may come this way
Pass them by! Pass them by! And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun,
Home is behind, the world ahead, Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
And there are many paths to tread Let them go! Let them go!
Through shadows to the edge of night, Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Until the stars are all alight. Fare you well! Fare you well!
Then world behind and home ahead,
We'll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!
-- J. R. R. Tolkien

Volcanoes have a grandeur that is grim
And earthquakes only terrify the dolts,
And to him who's scientific
There is nothing that's terrific
In the pattern of a flight of thunderbolts!
-- W.S. Gilbert, "The Mikado"

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-- Dylan Thomas, "Was There A Time"

Watching girls go passing by
It ain't the latest thing
I'm just standing in a doorway
I'm just trying to make some sense
Out of these girls passing by A smile relieves the heart that grieves
The tales they tell of men Remember what I said
I'm not waiting on a lady I'm not waiting on a lady
I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend
...
Don't need a whore
Don't need no booze
Don't need a virgin priest Ooh, making love and breaking hearts
But I need someone I can cry to It is a game for youth
I need someone to protect But I'm not waiting on a lady
I'm just waiting on a friend
I'm just waiting on a friend
-- Rolling Stones, "Waiting on a Friend"

We gotta get out of this place,
If it's the last thing we ever do.
-- The Animals

we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love,
we will cry over things we used to laugh &
our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentle
creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then &
in the end a summer with wild winds &
new friends will be.

We're Knights of the Round Table
We dance whene'er we're able
We do routines and chorus scenes We're knights of the Round Table
With footwork impeccable Our shows are formidable
We dine well here in Camelot But many times
We eat ham and jam and Spam a lot. We're given rhymes
That are quite unsingable
In war we're tough and able, We're opera mad in Camelot
Quite indefatigable We sing from the diaphragm a lot.
Between our quests
We sequin vests
And impersonate Clark Gable
It's a busy life in Camelot.
I have to push the pram a lot.
-- Monty Python

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Standby! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet--

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, 1941

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends!
We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside!
There behind the glass there's a real blade of grass,
Be careful as you pass, move along, move along.
Come inside, the show's about to start,
Guaranteed to blow your head apart.
Rest assured, you'll get your money's worth,
Greatest show, in heaven, hell or earth!
You gotta see the show! It's a dynamo!
You gotta see the show! It's rock 'n' roll!
-- ELP, "Karn Evil 9" (1st Impression, Part 2)

Well I looked at my watch and it said a quarter to five,
The headline screamed that I was still alive,
I couldn't understand it, I thought I died last night.
I dreamed I'd been in a border town,
In a little cantina that the boys had found,
I was desperate to dance, just to dig the local sounds.
When along came a senorita,
She looked so good that I had to meet her,
I was ready to approach her with my English charm,
When her brass knuckled boyfriend grabbed me by the arm,
And he said, grow some funk of your own, amigo,
Grow some funk of your own.
We no like to with the gringo fight,
But there might be a death in Mexico tonite.
...
Take my advice, take the next flight,
And grow some funk, grow your funk at home.
-- Elton John, "Grow Some Funk of Your Own"

Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they've no idea what money's for --
Ten to one they'll start another war.
I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
-- A.P. Herbert

Well, my daddy left home when I was three,
And he didn't leave much for Ma and me,
Just and old guitar an'a empty bottle of booze.
Now I don't blame him 'cause he ran and hid,
But the meanest thing that he ever did,
Was before he left he went and named me Sue.
...
But I made me a vow to the moon and the stars,
I'd search the honkey tonks and the bars,
And kill the man that give me that awful name.
It was Gatlinburg in mid-July,
I'd just hit town and my throat was dry,
Thought I'd stop and have myself a brew,
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
Sitting at a table, dealing stud,
Sat that dirty (bleep) that named me Sue.
...
Now, I knew that snake was my own sweet Dad,
From a wornout picture that my Mother had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye...
-- Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue"

Well, some take delight in the carriages a-rolling,
And some take delight in the hurling and the bowling,
But I take delight in the juice of the barley,
And courting pretty fair maids in the morning bright and early.

Well, we're big rock singers, we've got golden fingers,
And we're loved everywhere we go.
We sing about beauty, and we sing about truth,
At ten thousand dollars a show.
We take all kind of pills to give us all kind of thrills,
But the thrill we've never known,
Is the thrill that'll get'cha, when you get your picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

I got a freaky old lady, name of Cole King Katie,
Who embroiders on my jeans.
I got my poor old gray-haired daddy,
Drivin' my limousine.
Now it's all designed, to blow our minds,
But our minds won't be really be blown;
Like the blow that'll get'cha, when you get your picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

We got a lot of little, teen-aged, blue-eyed groupies,
Who'll do anything we say.
We got a genuine Indian guru, that's teachin' us a better way.
We got all the friends that money can buy,
So we never have to be alone.
And we keep gettin' richer, but we can't get our picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.
-- Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show
[As a note, they eventually DID make the cover of RS. Ed.]

What pains others pleasures me,
At home am I in Lisp or C;
There i couch in ecstasy,
'Til debugger's poke i flee,
Into kernel memory.
In system space, system space, there shall i fare--
Inside of a VAX on a silicon square.

What segment's this, that, laid to rest
On FHA0, is sleeping?
What system file, lay here a while This, this is "acct.run,"
While hackers around it were weeping? Accounting file for everyone.
Dump, dump it and type it out,
The file, the highseg of login.
Why lies it here, on public disk
And why is it now unprotected?
A bug in incant, made it thus. Mount, mount all your DECtapes now
And copy the file somehow, somehow. The problem has not been corrected.
Dump, dump it and type it out,
The file, the highseg of login.
-- to Greensleeves

What with chromodynamics and electroweak too
Our Standardized Model should please even you,
Tho' once you did say that of charm there was none
It took courage to switch as to say Earth moves not Sun.
Yet your state of the union penultimate large
Is the last known haunt of the Fractional Charge,
And as you surf in the hot tub with sourdough roll
Please ponder the passing of your sole Monopole.
Your Olympics were fun, you should bring them all back
For transsexual tennis or Anamalon Track,
But Hollywood movies remain sinfully crude
Whether seen on the telly or Remotely Viewed.
Now fasten your sunbelts, for you've done it once more,
You said it in Leipzig of the thing we adore,
That you've built an incredible crystalline sphere
Whose German attendants spread trembling and fearOf the death of our theory by Particle Zeta
Which I'll bet is not there say your article, later.
-- Sheldon Glashow, Physics Today, December, 1984

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.
Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.
-- Hugh Kingsmill

When in this world the headlines readOf those whose hearts are filled with greed
Who rob and steal from those who need
The cry goes up with blinding speed for Underdog (UNDERDOG!)
Underdog (UNDERDOG!)
Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
Fighting all who rob or plunder
Underdog (ah-ah-ah-ah)
Underdog
UNDERDOG!

When oxygen Tech played Hydrogen U.
The Game had just begun, when Hydrogen scored two fast points
And Oxygen still had none
Then Oxygen scored a single goal
And thus it did remain, At Hydrogen 2 and Oxygen 1
Called because of rain.

When someone makes a move We'll send them all we've got,Of which we don't approve, John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Who is it that always intervenes? Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
U.N. and O.A.S., To the shores of Tripoli,
They have their place, I guess, But not to Mississippoli,
But first, send the Marines! What do we do? We send the Marines!

For might makes right, Members of the corps
And till they've seen the light, All hate the thought of war:
They've got to be protected, They'd rather kill them off by
peaceful means.
All their rights respected, Stop calling it aggression--
Till somebody we like can be elected. We hate that expression!
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo;
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt, send the Marines!
-- Tom Lehrer, "Send The Marines"

When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.

Every day, to earn my daily bread
I go to the market where lies are bought
Hopefully
I take my place among the sellers.
-- Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood"

When you and I are far apart
Can sorrow break your tender heart?
I love you darling, yes I do;
Sleep is so sweet when I dream of you;
All you are is a blossoming rose.
Night is here so I must close.
With care read the first word of each line.
You will find a question of mine.
-- Yours hopefully, The VAX.

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say.
For it isn't your father or mother or wife
Whose judgement upon you must pass;
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.
Some people may think you a straight-shootin' chum
And call you a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.
He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest,
For he's with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of life
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you've cheated the man in the glass.

When you're a Yup
You're a Yup all the way
From your first slice of Brie
To your last Cabernet.

When you're a Yup
You're not just a dreamer
You're making things happen
You're driving a Beamer.

WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE
Oh, dear, where can the matter be
When it's converted to energy?
There is a slight loss of parity.
Johnny's so long at the fair.

While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
-- Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", 26/10 1792

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
-- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven"

[Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
referring to hardware interrupts.]

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine.
-- William Wordsworth, "She Was a Phantom of Delight"

[Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
referring to software interrupts.]

While walking down a crowded
City street the other day,
I heard a little urchin
To a comrade turn and say,
"Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse,
I'd be happy as a clam
If only I was de feller dat
Me mudder t'inks I am.

"She t'inks I am a wonder, My friends, be yours a life of toil
An' she knows her little lad Or undiluted joy,
Could never mix wit' nuttin' You can learn a wholesome lesson
Dat was ugly, mean or bad. From that small, untutored boy.
Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink Don't aim to be an earthly saint
How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! With eyes fixed on a star:
If a feller was de feller Just try to be the fellow that
Dat his mudder t'inks he is." Your mother thinks you are.
-- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow"

Why are you watching
The washing machine?
I love entertainment
So long as it's clean.

Professor Doberman:
While the preceding poem is unarguably a change from the guarded
pessimism of "The Hound of Heaven," it cannot be regarded as an unqualified
improvement. Obscurity is of value only when it tends to clarify the poetic
experience. As much as one is compelled to admire the poem's technique, one
must question whether its byplay of complex literary allusions does not in
fact distract from the unity of the whole. In the final analysis, one
receives the distinct impression that the poem's length could safely have
been reduced by a factor of eight or ten without sacrificing any of its
meaning. It is to be hoped that further publication of this poem can be
suspended pending a thorough investigation of its potential subversive
implications.

Yes me, I got a bottle in front of me.
And Jimmy has a frontal lobotomy.
Just different ways to kill the pain the same.
But I'd rather have a bottle in front of me,
Than to have to have a frontal lobotomy.
I might be drunk but at least I'm not insane.
-- Randy Ansley M.D. (Dr. Rock)

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head --
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling the box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like;
Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"

"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad;
Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And make errors few people could bear;
You complain about everyone's English but yours --
Do you really think this is quite fair?"

"I make lots of mistakes," Father William declared,
"But my stature these days is so great
That no critic can hurt me -- I've got them all scared,
And to stop me it's now far too late."

You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.
-- G.K. Chesterton

A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture. You don't have to go.
You'll just be walking down the street and... Ooohh, that's much better.
-- Steven Wright

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths.
-- Steven Wright

A MODERN FABLE

Aesop's fables and other traditional children's stories involve allegory
far too subtle for the youth of today. Children need an updated message
with contemporary circumstance and plot line, and short enough to suit
today's minute attention span.

The Troubled Aardvark

Once upon a time, there was an aardvark whose only pleasure in life was
driving from his suburban bungalow to his job at a large brokerage house
in his brand new 4x4. He hated his manipulative boss, his conniving and
unethical co-workers, his greedy wife, and his snivelling, spoiled
children. One day, the aardvark reflected on the meaning of his life and
his career and on the unchecked, catastrophic decline of his nation, its
pathetic excuse for leadership, and the complete ineffectiveness of any
personal effort he could make to change the status quo. Overcome by a
wave of utter depression and self-doubt, he decided to take the only
course of action that would bring him greater comfort and happiness: he
drove to the mall and bought imported consumer electronics goods.

"A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil!"
-- Firesign Theatre, "The Giant Rat of Summatra"

All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs
synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to
rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me allof the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store."
-- Steven Wright

Being Ymor's right-hand man was like being gently flogged to death with
scented bootlaces.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and
none of his friends like him either.
-- Oscar Wilde

Bozo is the Brotherhood of Zips and Others. Bozos are people who band
together for fun and profit. They have no jobs. Anybody who goes on a
tour is a Bozo. Why does a Bozo cross the street? Because there's a Bozo
on the other side. It comes from the phrase vos otros, meaning others.
They're the huge, fat, middle waist. The archetype is an Irish drunk
clown with red hair and nose, and pale skin. Fields, William Bendix.
Everybody tends to drift toward Bozoness. It has Oz in it. They mean
well. They're straight-looking except they've got inflatable shoes. They
like their comforts. The Bozos have learned to enjoy their free time,
which is all the time.
-- Firesign Theatre, "If Bees Lived Inside Your Head"

Death didn't answer. He was looking at Spold in the same way as a dog looks
at a bone, only in this case things were more or less the other way around.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

"Don't come back until you have him", the Tick-Tock Man said quietly,
sincerely, extremely dangerously.

They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardio plate crossoffs.
They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stick tites. They used
intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks.
They used cops. They used search and seizure. They used fallaron. They
used betterment incentives. They used finger prints. They used the
bertillion system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery.
They used Raoul-Mitgong but he wasn't much help. They used applied physics.
They used techniques of criminology. And what the hell, they caught him.
-- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin, said the Tick-Tock Man"

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat idea ...
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

First, a few words about tools.

Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of the
laws of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously injure
yourself. Today, people tend to take tools for granted. If you're ever
walking down the street and you notice some people who look particularly
smug, the odds are that they are taking tools for granted. If I were you,
I'd walk right up and smack them in the face.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

From the moment I picked your book up until I put it down I was convulsed
with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
-- Groucho Marx, from "The Book of Insults"

High Priest: Armaments Chapter One, verses nine through twenty-seven:
Bro. Maynard: And Saint Attila raised the Holy Hand Grenade up on high
saying, "Oh Lord, Bless us this Holy Hand Grenade, and with it
smash our enemies to tiny bits." And the Lord did grin, and the
people did feast upon the lambs, and stoats, and orangutans, and
breakfast cereals, and lima bean-
High Priest: Skip a bit, brother.
Bro. Maynard: And then the Lord spake, saying: "First, shalt thou take
out the holy pin. Then shalt thou count to three. No more, no less.
*Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the
counting shall be three. *Four* shalt thou not count, and neither
count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three. Five is
RIGHT OUT. Once the number three, being the third number be reached,
then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade towards thy foe, who, being
naughty in my sight, shall snuff it. Amen.
All: Amen.
-- Monty Python, "The Holy Hand Grenade"

I am getting into abstract painting. Real abstract -- no brush, no canvas,
I just think about it. I just went to an art museum where all of the art
was done by children. All the paintings were hung on refrigerators.
-- Steven Wright

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on
any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at
parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.
-- Dave Barry

"I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord."
"Indeed? Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander."
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"

I bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house.
-- Steven Wright

I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good
grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading causeof slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the
United States would have lost World War II."
-- Dave Barry, "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar"

"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I
pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He
said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors
opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked
at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around
with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert.
Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said
'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...'
The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank...
It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you
attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we
would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones,
I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick,
and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never
called me again."
-- Steven Wright

I got my driver's license photo taken out of focus on purpose. Now
when I get pulled over the cop looks at it (moving it nearer and
farther, trying to see it clearly)... and says, "Here, you can go."
-- Steven Wright

I got tired of listening to the recording on the phone at the movie
theater. So I bought the album. I got kicked out of a theater the
other day for bringing my own food in. I argued that the concession
stand prices were outrageous. Besides, I hadn't had a barbecue in a
long time. I went to the theater and the sign said adults $5 children
$2.50. I told them I wanted 2 boys and a girl. I once took a cab to
a drive-in movie. The movie cost me $95.
-- Steven Wright

I have a box of telephone rings under my bed. Whenever I get lonely, I
open it up a little bit, and I get a phone call. One day I dropped the
box all over the floor. The phone wouldn't stop ringing. I had to get
it disconnected. So I got a new phone. I didn't have much money, so I
had to get an irregular. It doesn't have a five. I ran into a friendof mine on the street the other day. He said why don't you give me a
call. I told him I can't call everybody I want to anymore, my phone
doesn't have a five. He asked how long had it been that way. I said I
didn't know -- my calendar doesn't have any sevens.
-- Steven Wright

I have a hobby. I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep
it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it.
-- Steven Wright

I have a map of the United States. It's actual size. I spent last summer
folding it. People ask me where I live, and I say, "E6".
-- Steven Wright

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.
-- Richard Diran

I just got out of the hospital after a speed reading accident.
I hit a bookmark.
-- Steven Wright

I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind!
The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building.
-- Charles Schulz

I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes. They had little pictures of cats
on them. Then I took one out and he ran around in circles.
-- Steven Wright

I sold my memoirs of my love life to Parker Brothers -- they're going
to make a game out of it.
-- Woody Allen

I suggest you locate your hot tub outside your house, so it won't do too
much damage if it catches fire or explodes. First you decide which
direction your hot tub should face for maximum solar energy. After much
trial and error, I have found that the best direction for a hot tub to face
is up.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

I thought there was something fishy about the butler. Probably a Pisces,
working for scale.
-- Firesign Theatre, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger"

I turned my air conditioner the other way around, and it got cold out.
The weatherman said "I don't understand it. I was supposed to be 80
degrees today," and I said "Oops."

In my house on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms above... so
I never have to go upstairs.

I just bought a microwave fireplace... You can spend an evening in
front of it in only eight minutes.
-- Steven Wright

I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had
to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks
like I'm the only one moving.

I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know
the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going
to be out that long."

I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now
my car goes 500 miles an hour.
-- Steven Wright

"I was drunk last night, crawled home across the lawn. By accident I
put the car key in the door lock. The house started up. So I figured
what the hell, and drove it around the block a few times. I thought I
should go park it in the middle of the freeway and yell at everyone to
get off my driveway."
-- Steven Wright

"I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked me if I had any
questions , I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the
speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen?

He said he couldn't answer that, I told him sorry, but I couldn't work
for him then.
-- Steven Wright

I'd never join any club that would have the likes of me as a member.
-- Groucho Marx

I'm not afraid of death -- I just don't want to be there when it happens.
-- Woody Allen

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would
have made them cute and furry.
-- Dave Barry

If you live to the age of a hundred you have it made because very few
people die past the age of a hundred.
-- George Burns

If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would be
to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call you to
say they had a nice time. Now you'll be be expected to throw another party
next year.
What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake
up several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've been
indicted for anything. You want your guests to be so anxious to avoid a
recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning parties of their
own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from having another one ...
If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door,
unless your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas
through your living room window. As host, your job is to make sure that
they don't arrest anybody. Or if they're dead set on arresting someone,
your job is to make sure it isn't you ...
-- Dave Barry

If you've done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round it
off with dinner at Milliway's, the restaurant at the end of the universe?
-- Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what
they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed
that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so
much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins
had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But
conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending
destruction of the of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to
alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were
misinterpreted ...
-- Douglas Admas "The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy"

Life is wasted on the living.
-- The Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe.

Like you, I am frequently haunted by profound questions related to man's
place in the Scheme of Things. Here are just a few:

Q -- Is there life after death?
A -- Definitely. I speak from personal experience here. On New
Year's Eve, 1970, I drank a full pitcher of a drink called "Black Russian",
then crawled out on the lawn and died within a matter of minutes, which was
fine with me because I had come to realize that if I had lived I would have
spent the rest of my life in the grip of the most excruciatingly painful
headache. Thanks to the miracle of modern orange juice, I was brought back
to life several days later, but in the interim I was definitely dead. I
guess my main impression of the afterlife is that it isn't so bad as long
as you keep the television turned down and don't try to eat any solid foods.
-- Dave Barry

"Many have seen Topaxci, God of the Red Mushroom, and they earn the
name of shaman," he said. Some have seen Skelde, spirit of the smoke, and
they are called sorcerers. A few have been privileged to see Umcherrel, the
soul of the forest, and they are known as spirit masters. But none have
seen a box with hundreds of legs that looked at them without eyes, and they
are known as idio--"
The interruption was caused by a sudden screaming noise and a flurryof snow and sparks that blew the fire across the dark hut; there was a brief
blurred vision and then the opposite wall was blasted aside and the
apparition vanished.
There was a long silence. Then a slightly shorter silence. Then
the old shaman said carefully, "You didn't just see two men go through
upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?"
The boy looked at him levelly. "Certainly not," he said.
The old man heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness for that," he
said. "Neither did I."
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

My brother sent me a postcard the other day with this big satellite photoof the entire earth on it. On the back it said: "Wish you were here".
-- Steven Wright

My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as
Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.
We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in
Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at
6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by
6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That
was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose
and Knights of Pithiests.
The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their
annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole,
which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They
weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my
pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough
word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were
imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.
We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.
So we're going back in a few years...
-- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]

Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something
to be avoided than harped upon.
Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being
reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might
just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something
about helping to postpone this reunion.
-- Douglas Adams

One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.
-- Larry Gelbart

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too
dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to
spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to
indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest
person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you
are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other
passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they
have plenty of food and water.
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"

Rincewind formed a mental picture of some strange entity living in a castle
made of teeth. It was the kind of mental picture you tried to forget.
Unsuccessfully.
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

Showing up is 80% of life.
-- Woody Allen

Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate
it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing
cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons".
Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt,
the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to
intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving,
which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls
and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force
jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you
should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large
sum of money and go to a mall.
-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

SOMETIMES THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD is so overwhelming, I just want to throw
back my head and gargle. Just gargle and gargle and I don't care who hears
me because I am beautiful.
-- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.

Thank goodness modern convenience is a thing of the remote future.
-- Pogo, by Walt Kelly

The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities.
Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to
park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also
dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big
difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to
do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want.
I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup
truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie"
on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the
accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular,
whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall
parking lots.
-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.
-- W. C. Fields

The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them
is a match.
-- Will Rogers

The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all
who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.
-- Benjamin Franklin.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on
the subject of towels.
Most importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For
some reason, if a non-hitchhiker discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel
with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a
toothbrush, washcloth, flask, gnat spray, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore,
the non-hitchhiker will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or
a dozen other items that he may have "lost". After all, any man who can
hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, struggle against terrible odds,
win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be
reckoned with.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

The Three Major Kind of Tools

* Tools for hittings things to make them loose or to tighten them up or
jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a
manner that they function perfectly. (These are your hammers, maces,
bludgeons, and truncheons.)

* Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate your foot. (Awls)

* Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far
greater than the value of any project that could possibly result.
(Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tool that uses
any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.)
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

There comes a time in the affairs of a man when he has to take the bull
by the tail and face the situation.
-- W.C. Fields

This land is full of trousers!
this land is full of mausers!
And pussycats to eat them when the sun goes down!
-- Firesign Theater

Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing.
-- Walt Kelly

What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making
them puke.
-- Steve Martin

"What shall we do?" said Twoflower.
"Panic?" said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was
the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people
faced with hungry sabretoothed tigers could be divided very simply into
those who panicked and those who stood there saying "What a magnificent
brute!" and "Here, pussy."
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
-- Steven Wright

"You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon
airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in
deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me
when I was young!"
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

You're a good example of why some animals eat their young.
-- Jim Samuels to a heckler

Ah, yes. I remember my first beer.
-- Steve Martin to a heckler

When your IQ rises to 28, sell.
-- Professor Irwin Corey to a heckler

FORTUNE'S RANDOM QUOTES FROM MATCH GAME 75, NO. 1:

Gene Rayburn: We'd like to close with a thought for the day, friends ---
something ...

Someone: (interrupting) Uh-oh

Gene Rayburn: ...pithy, full of wisdom --- and we call on the Poet
Laureate, Lipsy Russell

Lipsy Russell: The young people are very different today, and there is
one sure way to know: Kids to use to ask where they came
from, now they'll tell you where you can go.

All: (laughter)

A certain old cat had made his home in the alley behind Gabe's bar for some
time, subsisting on scraps and occasional handouts from the bartender. One
evening, emboldened by hunger, the feline attempted to follow Gabe through
the back door. Regrettably, only the his body had made it through when
the door slammed shut, severing the cat's tail at its base. This proved too
much for the old creature, who looked sadly at Gabe and expired on the spot.
Gabe put the carcass back out in the alley and went back to business.
The mandatory closing time arrived and Gabe was in the process of locking up
after the last customers had gone. Approaching the back door he was startled
to see an apparition of the old cat mournfully holding its severed tail out,
silently pleading for Gabe to put the tail back on its corpse so that it could
go on to the kitty afterworld complete.
Gabe shook his head sadly and said to the ghost, "I can't. You know
the law -- no retailing spirits after 2:00 AM."

A Dublin lawyer died in poverty and many barristers of the city subscribed to
a fund for his funeral. The Lord Chief Justice of Orbury was asked to donate
a shilling. "Only a shilling?" exclaimed the man. "Only a shilling to bury
an attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury twenty of them."

A friend of mine won't get a divorce, because he hates lawyers more than he
hates his wife.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
-- Robert Frost

A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in
his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and
exceptional ability in that particular field."

A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in
his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and exceptional
ability in that particular field."

A New York City judge ruled that if two women behind you at the
movies insist on discussing the probable outcome of the film, you have the
right to turn around and blow a Bronx cheer at them.

A New York City ordinance prohibits the shooting of rabbits from the
rear of a Third Avenue street car -- if the car is in motion.

According to Arkansas law, Section 4761, Pope's Digest: "No person
shall be permitted under any pretext whatever, to come nearer than
fifty feet of any door or window of any polling room, from the openingof the polls until the completion of the count and the certification of
the returns."

After 35 years, I have finished a comprehensive study of European
comparative law. In Germany, under the law, everything is prohibited,
except that which is permitted. In France, under the law, everything
is permitted, except that which is prohibited. In the Soviet Union,
under the law, everything is prohibited, including that which is
permitted. And in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted,
especially that which is prohibited.
-- Newton Minow,
Speech to the Association of American Law Schools, 1985

An attorney was defending his client against a charge of first-degree murder.
"Your Honor, my client is accused of stuffing his lover's mutilated body into
a suitcase and heading for the Mexican border. Just north of Tijuana a cop
spotted her hand sticking out of the suitcase. Now, I would like to stress
that my client is *___not* a murderer. A sloppy packer, maybe..."

An English judge, growing weary of the barrister's long-winded summation,
leaned over the bench and remarked, "I've heard your arguments, Sir
Geoffrey, and I'm none the wiser!" Sir Geoffrey responded, "That may be,
Milord, but at least you're better informed!"

Attorney General Edwin Meese III explained why the Supreme Court's Miranda
decision (holding that subjects have a right to remain silent and have a
lawyer present during questioning) is unnecessary: "You don't have many
suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person
is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect."
-- U.S. News and World Report, 10/14/85

... but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be
proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge
to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women
were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still
unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and
in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than
the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If
there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destituteof value.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Certain passages in several laws have always defied interpretation and the
most inexplicable must be a matter of opinion. A judge of the Court of
Session of Scotland has sent the editors of this book his candidate which
reads, "In the Nuts (unground), (other than ground nuts) Order, the expression
nuts shall have reference to such nuts, other than ground nuts, as would
but for this amending Order not qualify as nuts (unground) (other than ground
nuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground)."
-- Guiness Book of World Records, 1973

[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are
two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity:

(1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and
confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a pile and hold
a press conference where you announce that they have a street valueof $850 million. These raids never fail, because ALL high schools,
including brand-new, never-used ones, have at least 53 marijuana
cigarettes in the lockers. As far as anyone can tell, the locker
factory puts them there.
(2) Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you
announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a
piece of human sleaze. This also never fails, because you always
get a conviction. A juror at a pornography trial is not about to
state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie
where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a
fire extinguisher. He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and
vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong
impression.
-- Dave Barry, "Pornography"

District of Columbia pedestrians who leap over passing autos to escape
injury, and then strike the car as they come down, are liable for any
damage inflicted on the vehicle.

First there was Dial-A-Prayer, then Dial-A-Recipe, and even Dial-A-Footballer.
But the south-east Victorian town of Sale has produced one to top them all.
Dial-A-Wombat.
It all began early yesterday when Sale police received a telephone
call: "You won't believe this, and I'm not drunk, but there's a wombat in the
phone booth outside the town hall," the caller said.
Not firmly convinced about the caller's claim to sobriety, members of
the constabulary drove to the scene, expecting to pick up a drunk.
But there it was, an annoyed wombat, trapped in a telephone booth.
The wombat, determined not to be had the better of again, threw its
bulk into the fray. It was eventually lassoed and released in a nearby scrub.
Then the officers received another message ... another wombat in
another phone booth.
There it was: *Another* angry wombat trapped in a telephone booth.
The constables took the miffed marsupial into temporary custody and
released it, too, in the scrub.
But on their way back to the station they happened to pass another
telephone booth, and -- you guessed it -- another imprisoned wombat.
After some serious detective work, the lads in blue found a suspect,
and after questioning, released him to be charged on summons.
Their problem ... they cannot find a law against placing wombats in
telephone booths.
-- "Newcastle Morning Herald", NSW Australia, Aug 1980.

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.
-- Gore Vidal

For three years, the young attorney had been taking his brief
vacations at this country inn. The last time he'd finally managed an
affair with the innkeeper's daughter. Looking forward to an exciting
few days, he dragged his suitcase up the stairs of the inn, then stopped
short. There sat his lover with an infant on her lap!
"Helen, why didn't you write when you learned you were pregnant?"
he cried. "I would have rushed up here, we could have gotten married,
and the baby would have my name!"
"Well," she said, "when my folks found out about my condition,
we sat up all night talkin' and talkin' and finally decided it would be
better to have a bastard in the family than a lawyer."

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions:

It is a rule of evidence deduced from the experience of mankind and
supported by reason and authority that positive testimony is entitled to
more weight than negative testimony, but by the latter term is meant
negative testimony in its true sense and not positive evidence of a
negative, because testimony in support of a negative may be as positive
as that in support of an affirmative.
-- 254 Pac. Rep. 472.

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions:

We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be
left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it
seems to us that someone has been very careless.
-- 78 So. 365.

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions:

We think that we may take judicial notice of the fact that the term "bitch"
may imply some feeling of endearment when applied to a female of the canine
species but that it is seldom, if ever, so used when applied to a femaleof the human race. Coming as it did, reasonably close on the heels of two
revolver shots directed at the person of whom it was probably used, we think
it carries every reasonable implication of ill-will toward that person.
-- Smith v. Moran, 193 N.E. 2d 466.

Fortune's Law of the Week (this week, from Kentucky):
No female shall appear in a bathing suit at any airport in this
State unless she is escorted by two officers or unless she is armed
with a club. The provisions of this statute shall not apply to females
weighing less than 90 pounds nor exceeding 200 pounds, nor shall it
apply to female horses.

Fortune's nomination for All-Time Champion and Protector of Youthful
Morals goes to Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan. During an
impassioned House debate over a proposed bill to "expand oyster and
clam research," a sharp-eared informant transcribed the following
exchange between our hero and Rep. John D. Dingell, also of Michigan.

DINGELL: There are places in the world at the present time where we are
having to artificially propagate oysters and clams.
HOFFMAN: You mean the oysters I buy are not nature's oysters?
DINGELL: They may or may not be natural. The simple fact of the matter
is that female oysters through their living habits cast out
large amounts of seed and the male oysters cast out large
amounts of fertilization ...
HOFFMAN: Wait a minute! I do not want to go into that. There are many
teenagers who read The Congressional Record.

Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #18:

Q: Are you married?
A: No, I'm divorced.
Q: And what did your husband do before you divorced him?
A: A lot of things I didn't know about.

Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #32:

Q: Do you know how far pregnant you are right now?
A: I will be three months November 8th.
Q: Apparently then, the date of conception was August 8th?
A: Yes.
Q: What were you and your husband doing at that time?

"Gentlemen of the jury," said the defense attorney, now beginning
to warm to his summation, "the real question here before you is, shall this
beautiful young woman be forced to languish away her loveliest years in a
dark prison cell? Or shall she be set free to return to her cozy little
apartment at 4134 Mountain Ave. -- there to spend her lonely, loveless hours
in her boudoir, lying beside her little Princess phone, 962-7873?"

Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association is liked getting kicked
out of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
-- Melvin Belli on the occcasion of his getting kicked outof the American Bar Association

God decided to take the devil to court and settle their differences
once and for all.
When Satan heard of this, he grinned and said, "And just where do you
think you're going to find a lawyer?"

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of
those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the
will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of
government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
-- Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune"

"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you
can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height
on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car
or a job? Do you ever walk around? If so, you probably have the makings of
an excellent legal case. Although of course every case is different, I
would definitely say that based on my experience and training, there's no
reason why you shouldn't come out of this thing with at least a cabin
cruiser.

How do you insult a lawyer?
You might as well not even try. Consider: of all the highly
trained and educated professions, law is the only one in which the prime
lesson is that *winning* is more important than *truth*.
Once someone has sunk to that level, what worse can you say about them?

Humor in the Court:
Q. And who is this person you are speaking of?
A. My ex-widow said it.

Humor in the Court:
Q: ...any suggestions as to what prevented this from being a murder trial
instead of an attempted murder trial?
A: The victim lived.

Humor in the Court:
Q: So, after the anesthesia, when you came out of it, what did you observe
with respect to your scalp?
A: I didn't see my scalp the whole time I was in the hospital.
Q: It was covered?
A: Yes, bandaged.
Q: Then, later on.. what did you see?
A: I had a skin graft. My whole buttocks and leg were removed and put on topof my head.

Humor in the Court:
Q: The truth of the matter is that you were not an unbiased, objective
witness, isn't it. You too were shot in the fracas?
A: No, sir. I was shot midway between the fracas and the naval.

Humor in the Court:
Q: What can you tell us about the truthfulness and veracity of this defendant?
A: Oh, she will tell the truth. She said she'd kill that sonofabitch--and
she did!

Humor in the Court:
Q: What is the meaning of sperm being present?
A: It indicates intercourse.
Q: Male sperm?
A. That is the only kind I know.

I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some
kind of loophole.
-- Leo Kessler

I suppose some of the variation between Boston drivers and the rest of the
country is due to the progressive Massachusetts Driver Education Manual which
I happen to have in my top desk drawer. Some of the Tips for Better Driving
are worth considering, to wit:

[110.13]:
"When traveling on a one-way street, stay to the right, so as not
to interfere with oncoming traffic."

[22.17b]:
"Learning to change lanes takes time and patience. The best
recommendation that can be made is to go to a Celtics [basketball]
game; study the fast break and then go out and practice it
on the highway."

[41.16]:
"Never bump a baby carriage out of a crosswalk unless the kid's really
asking for it."

I suppose some of the variation between Boston drivers and the rest of the
country is due to the progressive Massachusetts Driver Education Manual which
I happen to have in my top desk drawer. Some of the Tips for Better Driving
are worth considering, to wit:

[131.16d]:
"Directional signals are generally not used except during vehicle
inspection; however, a left-turn signal is appropriate when making
a U-turn on a divided highway."

[96.7b]:
"When paying tolls, remember that it is necessary to release the
quarter a full 3 seconds before passing the basket if you are
traveling more than 60 MPH."

[110.13]:
"When traveling on a one-way street, stay to the right, so as not
to interfere with oncoming traffic."

I suppose some of the variation between Boston drivers and the rest of the
country is due to the progressive Massachusetts Driver Education Manual which
I happen to have in my top desk drawer. Some of the Tips for Better Driving
are worth considering, to wit:

[173.15b]:
"When competing for a section of road or a parking space, remember
that the vehicle in need of the most body work has the right-of-way."

[141.2a]:
"Although it is altogether possible to fit a 6' car into a 6'
parking space, it is hardly ever possible to fit a 6' car into
a 5' parking space."

[105.31]:
"Teenage drivers believe that they are immortal, and drive accordingly.
Nevertheless, you should avoid the temptation to prove them wrong."

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I
don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected
with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger,
the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier
in the summer.
-- Brendan Behan

Idaho state law makes it illegal for a man to give his sweetheart
a box of candy weighing less than fifty pounds.

"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
-- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)

In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excessof attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
-- Motor Trend, May 1983

In Lowes Crossroads, Delaware, it is a violation of local law for any
pilot or passenger to carry an ice cream cone in their pocket while
either flying or waiting to board a plane.

In Memphis, Tennessee, it is illegal for a woman to drive a car unless
there is a man either running or walking in front of it waving a red
flag to warn approaching motorists and pedestrians.

In Ohio, if you ignore an orator on Decoration day to such an extent as
to publicly play croquet or pitch horseshoes within one mile of the
speaker's stand, you can be fined $25.00.

In Pocatello, Idaho, a law passed in 1912 provided that "The carryingof concealed weapons is forbidden, unless same are exhibited to public view."

In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a
loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to
you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty
lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog
and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it
was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.

It has long been noticed that juries are pitiless for robbery and full of
indulgence for infanticide. A question of interest, my dear Sir! The jury
is afraid of being robbed and has passed the age when it could be a victimof infanticide.
-- Edmond About

It is against the law for a monster to enter the corporate limits of
Urbana, Illinois.

It seems these two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air
balloon to cross the United States. After forty hours in the air, George
turned to Harry, and said, "Harry, I think we've drifted off course! We
need to find out where we are."
Harry cools the air in the balloon, and they descend to below the
cloud cover. Slowly drifting over the countryside, George spots a man
standing below them and yells out, "Excuse me! Can you please tell me
where we are?"
The man on the ground yells back, "You're in a balloon, approximately
fifty feet in the air!"
George turns to Harry and says, "Well, that man *must* be a lawyer".
Replies Harry, "How can you tell?".
"Because the information he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally
useless!"

That's the end of The Joke, but for you people who are still worried about
George and Harry: they end up in the drink, and make the front page of the
New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer".

It's recently come to Fortune's attention that scientists have stopped
using laboratory rats in favor of attorneys. Seems that there are not
only more of them, but you don't get so emotionally attached. The only
difficulty is that it's sometimes difficult to apply the experimental
results to humans.

[Also, there are some things even a rat won't do. Ed.]

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that
reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away
someone else's cash.
-- P.G. Wodehouse, "Louder and Funnier"

Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!

Kirkland, Illinois, law forbids bees to fly over the village or through
any of its streets.

Let us remember that ours is a nation of lawyers and order.

Of ______course it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?

Old Barlow was a crossing-tender at a junction where an express train
demolished an automobile and its occupants. Being the chief witness, his
testimony was vitally important. Barlow explained that the night was dark,
and he waved his lantern frantically, but the driver of the car paid
no attention to the signal.
The railroad company won the case, and the president of the company
complimented the old-timer for his story. "You did wonderfully," he said,
"I was afraid you would waver under testimony."
"No sir," exclaimed the senior, "but I sure was afraid that durned
lawyer was gonna ask me if my lantern was lit."

Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his
roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the
forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind
the railroad yards."
-- H.L. Mencken, writing of William Jennings Bryan,
counsel for the supporters of Tennessee's anti-evolution
law at the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925.

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce
Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing
I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody
gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal
stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what a lesser person
would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.
-- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!"

Pittsburgh driver's test

(10) Potholes are

(a) extremely dangerous.
(b) patriotic.
(c) the fault of the previous administration.
(d) all going to be fixed next summer.

The correct answer is (b). Potholes destroy unpatriotic, unamerican,
imported cars, since the holes are larger than the cars. If you drive a
big, patriotic, American car you have nothing to worry about.

Pittsburgh driver's test

(5) Your car's horn is a vital piece of safety equipment. How often should
you test it?

(a) once a year.
(b) once a month.
(c) once a day.
(d) once an hour.

The correct answer is (d). You should test your car's horn at least once
every hour, and more often at night or in residential neighborhoods.

Pittsburgh Driver's Test

(7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light
but a steady left tail light. This means

(a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn
to call the problem to the driver's attention.
(b) the driver is signaling a right turn.
(c) the driver is signaling a left turn.
(d) the driver is from out of town.

The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign
countries to signal turns.

The correct answer is (c). Road salting employs thousands of persons
directly, and millions more indirectly, for example, salt miners and
rustproofers. Most important, salting reduces the life spans of cars,
thus stimulating the car and steel industries.

Some of the most interesting documents from Sweden's middle ages are the
old county laws (well, we never had counties but it's the nearest equivalent
I can find for "landskap"). These laws were written down sometime in the
13th century, but date back even down into Viking times. The oldest one is
the Vastgota law which clearly has pagan influences, thinly covered with some
Christian stuff. In this law, we find a page about "lekare", which is the
Old Norse word for a performing artist, actor/jester/musician etc. Here is
an approximate translation, where I have written "artist" as equivalent of
"lekare".
"If an artist is beaten, none shall pay fines for it. If an artist
is wounded, one such who goes with hurdie-gurdie or travels with
fiddle or drum, then the people shall take a wild heifer and bring
it out on the hillside. Then they shall shave off all hair from the
heifer's tail, and grease the tail. Then the artist shall be given
newly greased shoes. Then he shall take hold of the heifer's tail,
and a man shall strike it with a sharp whip. If he can hold her, he
shall have the animal. If he cannot hold her, he shall endure what
he received, shame and wounds."

Texas law forbids anyone to have a pair of pliers in his possession.

The City of Palo Alto, in its official description of parking lot standards,
specifies the grade of wheelchair access ramps in terms of centimeters of
rise per foot of run. A compromise, I imagine...

The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on
a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets.

The justifications for drug testing are part of the presently fashionable
debate concerning restoring America's "competitiveness." Drugs, it has been
revealed, are responsible for rampant absenteeism, reduced output, and poor
quality work. But is drug testing in fact rationally related to the
resurrection of competitiveness? Will charging the atmosphere of the
workplace with the fear of excretory betrayal honestly spur productivity?
Much noise has been made about rehabilitating the worker using drugs, but
to date the vast majority of programs end with the simple firing or the not
hiring of the abuser. This practice may exacerbate, not alleviate, the
nation's productivity problem. If economic rehabilitation is the ultimate
goal of drug testing, then criteria abandoning the rehabilitation of the
drug-using worker is the purest of hypocrisy and the worst of rationalization.
-- The concluding paragraph of "Constitutional Law: The
Fourth Amendment and Drug Testing in the Workplace,"
Tim Moore, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, vol.
10, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 762-768.

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men
should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal
weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine
we own.
-- H.G. Wells

The Least Successful Equal Pay Advertisement
In 1976 the European Economic Community pointed out to the Irish
Government that it had not yet implemented the agreed sex equality
legislation. The Dublin Government immediately advertised for an equal pay
enforcement officer. The advertisement offered different salary scales for
men and women.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
-- U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10. (Bill of Rights)

The state law of Pennsylvania prohibits singing in the bathtub.

The Worst Jury
A murder trial at Manitoba in February 1978 was well advanced, when
one juror revealed that he was completely deaf and did not have the
remotest clue what was happening.
The judge, Mr. Justice Solomon, asked him if he had heard any
evidence at all and, when there was no reply, dismissed him.
The excitement which this caused was only equalled when a second
juror revealed that he spoke not a word of English. A fluent French
speaker, he exhibited great surprised when told, after two days, that he
was hearing a murder trial.
The trial was abandoned when a third juror said that he suffered
from both conditions, being simultaneously unversed in the English language
and nearly as deaf as the first juror.
The judge ordered a retrial.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

There is a Massachusetts law requiring all dogs to have their hind legs
tied during the month of April.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law.
No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.
-- Jean Giraudoux, "Tiger at the Gates"

There is no doubt that my lawyer is honest. For example, when he
filed his income tax return last year, he declared half of his salary
as 'unearned income.'
-- Michael Lara

There's no justice in this world.
-- Frank Costello, on the prosecution of "Lucky" Luciano by
New York district attorney Thomas Dewey after Luciano had
saved Dewey from assassination by Dutch Schultz (by ordering
the assassination of Schultz instead)

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We may not like doctors, but at least they doctor. Bankers are not ever
popular but at least they bank. Policeman police and undertakers take
under. But lawyers do not give us law. We receive not the gladsome lightof jurisprudence, but rather precedents, objections, appeals, stays,
filings and forms, motions and counter-motions, all at $250 an hour.
-- Nolo News, summer 1989

We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they
remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered, that
the lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than
the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule,
states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals.
These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who
want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that
they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and
who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country.
-- Cleon, Thucydides, III, 37 translation by Rex Warner

When alerted to an intrusion by tinkling glass or otherwise, 1) Calm
yourself 2) Identify the intruder 3) If hostile, kill him.

Step number 3 is of particular importance. If you leave the guy alive
out of misguided softheartedness, he will repay your generosity of spirit
by suing you for causing his subsequent paraplegia and seek to force you
to support him for the rest of his rotten life. In court he will plead
that he was depressed because society had failed him, and that he was
looking for Mother Teresa for comfort and to offer his services to the
poor. In that lawsuit, you will lose. If, on the other hand, you kill
him, the most that you can expect is that a relative will bring a wrongful
death action. You will have two advantages: first, there be only your
story; forget Mother Teresa. Second, even if you lose, how much could
the bum's life be worth anyway? A Lot less than 50 years worth of
paralysis. Don't play George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Finish the job.
-- G. Gordon Liddy's "Forbes" column on personal security

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to
examine the laws of heat.
-- Christopher Morley

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are
correct.
-- Princess Irulan, "Manual of Maud'Dib"

A boy spent years collecting postage stamps. The girl next door bought
an album too, and started her own collection. "Dad, she buys everything I've
bought, and it's taken all the fun out of it for me. I'm quitting." Don't,
son, remember, 'Imitation is the sincerest form of philately.'"

A certain amount of opposition is a help, not a hindrance. Kites rise
against the wind, not with it.

A father gave his teen-age daughter an untrained pedigreed pup for
her birthday. An hour later, when wandering through the house, he found her
looking at a puddle in the center of the kitchen. "My pup," she murmured
sadly, "runneth over."

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet (sort of).

A good name lost is seldom regained. When character is gone,
all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost forever.
-- J. Hawes

A good scapegoat is hard to find.
A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.
-- Carolyn Wells

A handful of friends is worth more than a wagon of gold.

A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.

A hermit is a deserter from the army of humanity.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
-- Lao Tsu

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.
-- Lao Tsu

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in time of
trouble.
-- Adlai Stevenson

-- All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
-- When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited
carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.
-- Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
-- A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated
the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles.
-- Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally.
-- Male cadavers are incapable of yielding testimony.
-- Individuals who make their abode in vitreous edifices would be well
advised to refrain from catapulting projectiles.

An ounce of clear truth is worth a pound of obfuscation.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
-- Michael Korda

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.
-- Spanish proverb

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge."

Any road followed to its end leads precisely nowhere.
Climb the mountain just a little to test it's a mountain.
From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
-- Bene Gesserit proverb, "Dune"

As well look for a needle in a bottle of hay.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
-- Homer

Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
-- motto of the Christopher Society

Beware of friends who are false and deceitful.

Beware of geeks bearing graft.

Cheap things are of no value, valuable things are not cheap.

Fortune finishes the great quotations, #3

Birds of a feather flock to a newly washed car.

Freedom from incrustation of grime is contiguous to rectitude.

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world
as he who is ready to die.
-- Giacomo Leopardi

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
-- Dr. Johnson

Honi soit qui mal y pense.
[Evil to him who evil thinks.]
-- Motto of the Order of the Garter (est. Edward III)

-- Male cadavers are incapable of yielding testimony.
-- Individuals who make their abode in vitreous edifices would be well advised
to refrain from catapulting projectiles.
-- Neophyte's serendipity.
-- Exclusive dedication to necessitious chores without interludes of hedonistic
diversion renders John a hebetudinous fellow.
-- A revolving concretion of earthy or mineral matter accumulates no congeriesof small, green bryophytic plant.
-- Abstention from any aleatory undertaking precludes a potential escallationof a lucrative nature.
-- Missiles of ligneous or osteal consistency have the potential of fracturing
osseous structure, but appellations will eternally remain innocuous.

Man is the measure of all things.
-- Protagoras

Mother is the invention of necessity.

-- Neophyte's serendipity.
-- Exclusive dedication to necessitious chores without interludes of
hedonistic diversion renders John a hebetudinous fellow.
-- A revolving concretion of earthy or mineral matter accumulates no
congeries of small, green bryophytic plant.
-- The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the
optimal cachinnation.
-- Abstention from any aleatory undertaking precludes a potential
escallation of a lucrative nature.
-- Missiles of ligneous or osteal consistency have the potential of
fracturing osseous structure, but appellations will eternally
remain innocuous.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
-- Aesop

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
-- Aristotle

None love the bearer of bad news.
-- Sophocles

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit.
[There is no great genius without some touch of madness.]
-- Seneca

One good turn usually gets most of the blanket.

Out of sight is out of mind.
-- Arthur Clough

-- Scintillate, scintillate, asteroid minikin.
-- Members of an avian species of identical plumage congregate.
-- Surveillance should precede saltation.
-- Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity.
-- It is fruitless to become lachrymose over precipitately departed
lacteal fluid.
-- Freedom from incrustations of grime is contiguous to rectitude.
-- It is fruitless to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated
canine with innovative maneuvers.
-- Eschew the implement of correction and vitiate the scion.
-- The temperature of the aqueous content of an unremittingly
galled saucepan does not reach 212 degrees Farenheit.

Small change can often be found under seat cushions.
-- One of Lazarus Long's most penetrating insights

The course of true anything never does run smooth.
-- Samuel Butler

The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train.

The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

The temperature of the aqueous content of an unremittingly ogled
culinary vessel will not achieve 100 degrees on the Celsius scale.

The worst is enemy of the bad.

-- The writing implement is more potent than the claymore.
-- All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
-- When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited carbonaceous
materials, there is conflagration.
-- Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
-- A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated
the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles.
-- The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the
optimal cachinnation.
-- Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally.

There are more ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
-- Benjamin Franklin

We have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's out.

When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!"
-- Turkish proverb

When we talk of tomorrow, the gods laugh.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth.
-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four"

Words are the voice of the heart.

You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can make a fool of yourself anytime.

You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can never fool your Mom.

You can fool some of the people some of the time,
and some of the people all of the time,
and that is sufficient.

You can move the world with an idea, but you have to think of it first.

You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?
-- Joel Chandler Harris, proverbs of Uncle Remus

You may be marching to the beat of a different drummer, but you're
still in the parade.

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #19
A: To be or not to be.
Q: What is the square root of 4b^2?

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #31
A: Chicken Teriyaki.
Q: What is the name of the world's oldest kamikaze pilot?

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #4
A: Go west, young man, go west!
Q: What do wabbits do when they get tiwed of wunning awound?

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #5
A: The Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli.
Q: Name two families whose kids won't join the Marines.

Q: "What is the burning question on the mind of every dyslexic
existentialist?"
A: "Is there a dog?"

Q: How do you know when you're in the <ethnic> section of Vermont?
A: The maple sap buckets are hanging on utility poles.

Q: How does a hacker fix a function which
doesn't work for all of the elements in its domain?
A: He changes the domain.

Q: How does the Polish Constitution differ from the American?
A: Under the Polish Constitution citizens are guaranteed freedom of
speech, but under the United States constitution they are
guaranteed freedom after speech.
-- being told in Poland, 1987

Q: How many Bell Labs Vice Presidents does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's proprietary information. Answer available from AT&T on paymentof license fee (binary only).

Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the light bulb
itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective
reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a
maudlin cosmos of nothingness.

Q: How many gradual (sorry, that's supposed to be "graduate") students
does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: "I'm afraid we don't know, but make my stipend tax-free, give my
advisor a $30,000 grant of the taxpayer's money, and I'm sure he
can tell me how to do the shit work for him so he can take the
credit for answering this incredibly vital question."

Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fifteen. One to do it, and fourteen to write document number
GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility,of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally
left blank", and 20% of the definitions are of the form "A:.....
consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks".

Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to bring
light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot
to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a Pulitzer prize for
reporting that Electric Company hired a light bulb-assassin to break
the bulb in the first place.

Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the
party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith
agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed
from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed
upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of
the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating
at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of
the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the
second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the
parties.
The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be
limited to, the following. The party of the first part shall, with or without
elevation at his option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other
means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the partyof the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered
non-negotiable. Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part
becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall
have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner
consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes.
Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part
shall have the option of beginning installation. Aforesaid installation shall
occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in
step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation
should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable.
The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the
first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to
produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership.

Q: How many Marxists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None: The light bulb contains the seeds of its own revolution.

Q: How many members of the U.S.S. Enterprise does it take to change a
light bulb?
A: Seven. Scotty has to report to Captain Kirk that the light bulb in
the Engineering Section is getting dim, at which point Kirk will send
Bones to pronounce the bulb dead (although he'll immediately claim
that he's a doctor, not an electrician). Scotty, after checking
around, realizes that they have no more new light bulbs, and complains
that he "canna" see in the dark. Kirk will make an emergency stop at
the next uncharted planet, Alpha Regula IV, to procure a light bulb
from the natives, who, are friendly, but seem to be hiding something.
Kirk, Spock, Bones, Yeoman Rand and two red shirt security officers
beam down to the planet, where the two security officers are promply
killed by the natives, and the rest of the landing party is captured.
As something begins to develop between the Captain and Yeoman Rand,
Scotty, back in orbit, is attacked by a Klingon destroyer and must
warp out of orbit. Although badly outgunned, he cripples the Klingon
and races back to the planet in order to rescue Kirk et. al. who have
just saved the natives' from an awful fate and, as a reward, been
given all light bulbs they can carry. The new bulb is then inserted
and the Enterprise continues on its five year mission.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two, one to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub
with brightly colored machine tools.

[Surrealist jokes just aren't my cup of fur. Ed.]

Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays outof the way.

Q: What do you call a principal female opera singer whose high C
is lower than those of other principal female opera singers?
A: A deep C diva.

Q: What do you call the money you pay to the government when
you ride into the country on the back of an elephant?
A: A howdah duty.

Q: What does it say on the bottom of Coke cans in North Dakota?
A: Open other end.

Q: What is printed on the bottom of beer bottles in Minnesota?
A: Open other end.

Q: What is the sound of one cat napping?
A: Mu.

Q: What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
A: A nervous wreck.

Q: What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead
lawyer in the road?
A: There are skid marks in front of the dog.

Q: What's the difference between Bell Labs and the Boy Scouts of America?
A: The Boy Scouts have adult supervision.

Q: What's yellow, and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's Lemon.

Q: Why do people who live near Niagara Falls have flat foreheads?
A: Because every morning they wake up thinking "What *is* that noise?
Oh, right, *of course*!

Q: Why don't Scotsmen ever have coffee the way they like it?
A: Well, they like it with two lumps of sugar. If they drink
it at home, they only take one, and if they drink it while
visiting, they always take three.

Q: Why is Christmas just like a day at the office?
A: You do all of the work and the fat guy in the suit
gets all the credit.

Q: Why is it that the more accuracy you demand from an interpolation
function, the more expensive it becomes to compute?
A: That's the Law of Spline Demand.

* SynrG notes that the number of configuration questions to answer in
sendmail is NON-TRIVIAL

<jim> Lemme make sure I'm not wasting time here... bcwhite will remove
pkgs that havent been fixed that have outstanding bugs of severity
"important". True or false?
<JHM> jim: "important" or higher. True.
<jim> Then we're about to lose ftp.debian.org and dpkg :)
* netgod will miss dpkg -- it was occasionally useful
<Joey> We still have rpm....

We the people of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, in order to form a
more perfect operating system, establish quality, insure marketplace
diversity, provide for the common needs of computer users, promote
security and privacy, overthrow monopolistic forces in the computer
software industry, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and
our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Debian
GNU/Linux System.

While the year 2000 (y2k) problem is not an issue for us, all Linux
implementations will impacted by the year 2038 (y2.038k) issue. The
Debian Project is committed to working with the industry on this issue
and we will have our full plans and strategy posted by the first quarterof 2020.

"my biggest problem with RH (and especially RH contrib packages) is that
they DON'T have anything like our policy. That's one of the main reasons
why their packages are so crappy and broken. Debian has the teamwork
side of building a distribution down to a fine art."

<xinkeT> "Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom
to hide the bodies of the people I had to kill because they
pissed me off."

* dark has changed the topic on channel #debian to: Later tonight: After
months of careful refrigeration, Debian 2.0 is finally cool enough to
release.

I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running
Linux. And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and God handed down a
client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million
Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred
years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola.
-- LAN Times

"I think that most debian developers are rather "strong willed" people
with a great degree of understanding and a high level of passion for what
they perceive as important in development of the debian system."
--Bill Leach

"Actually, the only distribution of Linux I've ever used that passed the
rootshell test out of the box (hit rootshell at the time the dist is
released and see if you can break the OS with scripts from there) is
Debian."
-- seen on the Linux security-audit mailing list

"and i actually like debian 2.0 that much i completely revamped the
default config of the linux systems our company sells and reinstalled anyof the linux systems in the office and here at home.."

<dark> "Let's form the Linux Standard Linux Standardization Association
Board. The purpose of this board will be to standardize Linux
Standardization Organizations."

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Internet users who spend even a few hours a week online
at home experience higher levels of depression and loneliness than if
they had used the computer network less frequently, The New York Times
reported Sunday. The result ... surprised both researchers and
sponsors, which included Intel Corp., Hewlett Packard, AT&T Research and
Apple Computer.

"What is striking, however, is the general layout and integration of the
system. Debian is a truly elegant Linux distribution; great care has
been taken in the preparation of packages and their placement within the
system. The sheer number of packages available is also impressive...."

Debian Linux is a solid, comprehensive product, and a genuine pleasure to
use. It is also great to become involved with the Debian collective,
whose friendliness and spirit recalls the early days of the Internet and
its sense of openness and global cooperation.

Now I can finally explain to everyone why I do this. I just got $7 worthof free stuff for working on Debian !

World Domination, of course. And scantily clad females. Who cares if
its twenty below? -- Linus Torvalds

<dark> "Hey, I'm from this project called Debian... have you heard of it?
Your name seems to be on a bunch of our stuff."

"In the event of a percieved failing of the project leadership #debian is
empowered to take drastic and descisive action to correct the failing,
including by not limited to expelling officials, apointing new officials
and generally abusing power"
-- proposed amendment to Debian Constitution

* Twilight1 will have to hang his Mozilla beanie dinosaur in effigy if
Netscape sells-out to Alot Of Losers..

<dark> Culus: Building a five-meter-high replica of the Empire State
Building with paperclips is impressive. Doing it blindfolded is
eleet.

"I wonder if this is the first constitution in the history of mankind
where you have to calculate a square root to determine if a motion
passes. :-)"
-- Seen on Slashdot

This is the solution to Debian's problem .. and since the only real way
to create more relatives of developers is to have children, we need more
sex! It's a long term investment ... it's the work itself that is
satisfying!
-- Craig Brozefsky

<Knghtbrd> Studies prove that research causes cancer in 43% of laboratory
rats
<CQ> knghtbrd- yeah, but 78% of those statistics are off by 52%...

<stu> apt: !bugs
<apt> !bugs are stupid
<dpkg> apt: are stupid? what's that?
<apt> dpkg: i don't know
<dpkg> apt: Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder...
<apt> i already had it that way, dpkg.

The purpose of having mailing lists rather than having newsgroups is to
place a barrier to entry which protects the lists and their users from
invasion by the general uneducated hordes.
-- Ian Jackson

Most of us feel that marketing types are like a dangerous weapon - keep
'em unloaded and locked up in a cupboard, and only bring them out when
you need them to do a job.
-- Craig Sanders

<MrCurious> by the power of greyskull
<MrCurious> someone tell me the ban to place
<Sopwith> mrcurious: *.debian.org, *.novare.net
<philX> *.debian.org. that's awesome.
-- Seen on LinuxNet #linux

"What does this tell me? That if Microsoft were the last software
company left in the world, 13% of the US population would be scouring
garage sales & Goodwill for old TRS-80s, CPM machines & Apple ]['s before
they would buy Microsoft. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."
-- Seen on Slashdot

"Bruce McKinney, author ofof Hardcore Visual Basic, has announced that
he's fed up with VB and won't be writing a 3rd edition of his book. The
best quote is at the end: 'I don't need a language designed by a focus
group'."

* Overfiend ponders doing an NMU of asclock, in which he simply changes
the extended description to "If you bend over and put your head between
your legs, you can read the time off your assclock."
<doogie> Overfiend: go to bed.

<Reed> It is important to note that the primary reason the Roman Empire
fail is that they had no concept of zero... thus they could not
test the success or failure of their C programs.

Since when has the purpose of debian been to appease the interests of the
mass of unskilled consumers? -- Steve Shorter

<Chalky> gcc is the best compressor ever ported to linux. it can turn
12MB of kernel source (and that's .debbed) into a 500k kernel

<dark> Knghtbrd: We have lots of whatevers.
<Knghtbrd> dark - In Debian? Hell yeah we do!

If we want something nice to get born in nine months, then sex has to
happen. We want to have the kind of sex that is acceptable and fun for both
people, not the kind where someone is getting screwed. Let's get some cross
fertilization, but not someone getting screwed.
-- Larry Wall

p.s. - i'm about *this* close to running around in the server room with a
pair of bolt cutters, and a large wooden mallet, laughing like a maniac and
cutting everything i can fit the bolt cutters around. and whacking that
which i cannot. so if i seem semi-incoherent, or just really *really* nasty
at times, please forgive me. stress is not a pretty thing. };P
-- Phillip R. Jaenke

<Knghtbrd> xtifr - beware of james when he's off his medication =>

Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

California, n.:
From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or
Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or
"fornication." Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex."
-- Ed Moran

The X Window System:
The standard UNIX graphical environment. With Linux, this is usually
XFree86 (http://www.xfree86.org). You may call it X, XFree, the X
Window System, XF86, or a host of other things. Call it 'XWindows' and
someone will smack you and you will have deserved it.

* Overfiend sighs
<Overfiend> Netscape sucks.
<Overfiend> It is a house of cards resting on a bed of quicksand.
<Espy> during an earthquake
<Overfiend> in a tornado

<netgod> Feanor: u have no idea of the depth of the stupidty of american law

Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me.
-- Linus Torvalds

* knghtbrd can already envision: "Subject: [INTENT TO PREPARE TO PROPOSE
FILING OF BUG REPORT] Typos in the policy document"

<netgod> heh thats a lost cause, like the correct pronounciation of
"jewelry"
<netgod> give it up :-)
<sage> and the correct spelling of "colour" :)
<BenC> heh
<sage> and aluminium
<BenC> or nuclear weapons
<sage> are you threating me yankee ?
<sage> just cause we don't have the bomb...
<BenC> back off ya yellow belly

<Knghtbrd> Overfiend - BTW, after we've discovered X takes all of 1.4 GIGS
to build, are you willing admit that X is bloatware? =>
<Overfiend> KB: there is a 16 1/2 minute gap in my answer
<acf> knghtbrd: evidence exists that X is only the *2nd* worst windowing
system ;)

<Knghtbrd> you know, Linux needs a platform game starring Tux
<Knghtbrd> kinda Super Marioish, but with Tux and things like little cyber
bugs and borgs and that sort of thing ...
<Knghtbrd> And you have to jump past billgatus and hit the key to drop him
into the lava and then you see some guy that looks like a RMS
or someone say "Thank you for rescuing me Tux, but Linus
Torvalds is in another castle!"

<Thoth_> Yeah, well that's why it's numbered 2.3.1... it's for those of us
who miss NT-like uptimes

<Knghtbrd> Granted, RMS is a fanatic, I don't deny this. I'll even say
he's a royal pain in the arse most of the time. But he's
still more often right than not, and he deserves some level of
credit and respect for his work. We would NOT be here today
without him.

<gecko> Hmm... I wonder what else seperates Debian from the rest of the
Linux distributions.
<Knghtbrd> gecko - We Don't Suck
<gecko> Knghtbrd: you don't say that when addressing a bunch of people
FROM those distros
<Knghtbrd> gecko - point.

Due to the closed source development model of XFree it is impossible
to support, or even speculate about, features in pre- or beta releasesof XFree.
-- Marcus Sundberg

But it hasn't been updated in a long time, many would say that it's
sadly out of date, and the upstream maintainer doesn't respond to his
email. :-)
-- Branden Robinson, Oliver Elphick, and Chris Waters in a
message to debian-policy

<Knghtbrd> I can think of lots of people who need USER=ID10T someplace!

<Knghtbrd> If we're both right (I'm guessing we are) I'm Not Very Happy.
* Minupla hands you the understatement of the year award.

<Culus> dhd: R you part of the secret debian overstructure?
<dhd> no. there is no secret debian overstructure.
<CosmicRay> although, now that somebody brought it up, let's start one
:-)
<Knghtbrd> CosmicRay - why not, sounds like a fun way to spend the
afternoon =D

<jgoerzen> stu: ahh that machine. Don't you think that something named
stallman deserves to be an Alpha? :-)
<stu> jgoerzen: no, actually, I'd prolly be more inclined to name a 386
with 4 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard drive stallman.
<stu> with a big fat case that makes tons of noise and rattles the floor
* Knghtbrd falls to the floor holding his sides laughing
<stu> and..
<stu> double-height hard drive

<Knghtbrd> Okay, you people have started talking about BSDM applications of
network hardware... I think I'll run off and do something useful
and Debianish and stay OUT of this one...
<Knghtbrd> (for a change)

<Knghtbrd> mariab - don't think Debian hasn't had some very stupid and
obvious bugs before
<Knghtbrd> of course, we usually fix ours BEFORE we release =D

> > But IANAL, of course.
>
> IANAL either. My son is, but if I asked him I might get an answer I
> wouldn't want to hear.

"Here's my invoice." ? =D

<_Anarchy_> acf: maybe April 1 next year slashdot needs to run "Rob Malda
accepts new job as head of Debian project" 8)

Perhaps Debian is concerned more about technical excellence rather than
ease of use by breaking software. In the former we may excel. In the
latter we have to concede the field to Microsoft. Guess where I want to go
today?
-- Manoj Srivastava

<netgod> my client has been owned severely
<netgod> this guy got root, ran packet sniffers, installed .rhosts and
backdoors, put a whole new dir in called /lib/" ", which has a
full suite of smurfing and killing tools
<netgod> the only mistake was not deleting the logfiles
<netgod> question is how was root hacked, and that i couldnt tell u
<netgod> it is, of course, not a debian box
* netgod notes the debian box is the only one left untouched by the hacker
-- wonder why

I stopped a long time ago to try to find anything in the bug list of dpkg.
We should run for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.
-- Stephane Bortzmeyer

* joeyh takes advantage of netscape's marvelous ability to crash to close
10 windows with a single keypress
<joeyh> now that's progress!
<Knghtbrd> Bus error =>

Techical solutions are not a matter of voting. Two legislations in the US
states almost decided that the value of Pi be 3.14, exactly. Popular vote
does not make for a correct solution.
-- Manoj Srivastava

Since this database is not used for profit, and since entire works are not
published, it falls under fair use, as we understand it. However, if any
half-assed idiot decides to make a profit off of this, they will need to
double check it all...
-- Notes included with the default fortunes database

Subject: Bug#42432: debian-policy: Proposal for CTV for Draft for Proof of
Concept for Draft for Proposal for Proposal for CTV for a CTV to decide on
a proposal for a CTV for the CTV on whether or not we shoud have a CTV on
the /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc transition now, or later.
-- Ed Lang

Red Hat has recently released a Security Advisory (RHSA-1999:030-01)
covering a buffer overflow in the vixie cron package. Debian has
discovered this bug two years ago and fixed it. Therefore versions in
both, the stable and the unstable, distributions of Debian are not
vulnerable to this problem..

<rain_work> note on a dorm fridge ... "To the person who ate the contentsof the container labeled 'James' - warning, it was my biology
experiment"

<KnaraKat> DalNet is like the special olympics of IRC. There's a lot of
drooling goin' on and everyone is a 'winner'.

But modifying dpkg is infeasible, and we've agreed to, among other things,
keep the needs of our users at the forefront of our minds. And from a
user's perspective, something that keeps the system tidy in the normal
case, and works *now*, is much better than idealistic fantasies like a
working dpkg.
-- Manoj Srivastava

Given some of the recent threads, the interactive discussions might
need to be conducted on canvas, in the presence of a referee, while
wearing padded gloves. ;-)
-- Phil Hands

In fact.. based on this model of what the NSA is and isn't... many of the
people reading this are members of the NSA... /. is afterall 'News for
Nerds'.

NSA MONDAY MORNING {at the coffee machine):
NSA AGENT 1: Hey guys, did you check out slashdot over the weekend?
AGENT 2: No, I was installing Mandrake 6.1 and I coulnd't get the darn
ppp connection up..
AGENT 1: Well check it out... they're on to us.
-- Chris Moyer <cdmoyer@starmail.com>

<Knghtbrd> NOTE THAT THE ABOVE IS JUST AN OPINION AND SHOULD NOT BE
TAKEN TO INCLUDE ANY MEASURE OF FACTUAL INFORMATION. THE
SPEAKER DISCLAIMS EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. DEAL WITH IT.

<Madax> ahh
<Madax> a gathering of geeks....
<Madax> I can smell it now

Caveats: it's GNOME, be afraid, be very afraid of the Depends line
-- James Troup

<lilo> I can read the bloody *manual* as if it were some sort of
religious tract describing forms of enlightenment you can achieve
after 10 years on a mountain :)

Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.

I think irc isn't going to work though---we're running out of topic space!
-- Joseph Carter

<knghtbrd> If charging someone for violation of US crypto laws would get
you laughed out of court, just "investigate" them on hte chargeof TREASON!
<knghtbrd> Tea, anyone?
<Espy> I'd rather drown politicians instead of tea :)
<stu> espy: politicians have gills, duh
<Espy> weasels don't have gills

<Espy_on_crack> "I installed 'Linux 6.1', doesn't that make me a unix
guru?"
<BenC> Espy_on_crack: no, you have to install it twice before you are a
guru...once to prove you can do it, the second to fix the things
your broke the first time
<Espy_on_crack> oh right, how silly of me

<Espy> be careful, some twit might quote you
<Espy> out of context...

* cesarb wonders if in less than a week Carmack will end up receiving in
e-mail a courtesy copy of a version of the Quake source which is four
times faster than what went out of his virtual hands...

<Palisade> knght, sheesh, are you pasting my words out of context in
#debian or something?
<Palisade> ;)
<Knghtbrd> no, but I probably should be ;>
<Palisade> d'oh!

I'd been hearing all sorts of gloom and doom predictions for Y2K, so I
thought I'd heed some of the advice that the experts have been giving:
Fill up the car's gas tank, stock up on canned goods, fill up the bathtub
with water, and so on.

I guess I wasn't fully awake when I completed my preparations late last
night. This morning I found the kitchen shelves soaked in gasoline, water
in the car's gas tank, and my bathtub filled with baked beans.
-- Dan Pearl in a message to rec.humor.funny

* gxam wonders if all these globals are really necessary
<Knghtbrd> most of them at the moment yes
<Knghtbrd> we REALLY need to clean them up at some point
<Knghtbrd> gxam: the globals will have to go away as we migrate towards
modularity and madness (ie, libtool)

<raptor> Adamel, i think the code you fixed of mine didn't work
<raptor> i must not have commited the working code
<Knghtbrd> raptor: like it's the first time THAT has ever happened =p

<jt> should a bug be marked critical if it only affects one arch?
<james-workaway> jt: rc for that arch maybe, but those kind of arch
specific bugs are rare...
<jt> not when it's caused by a bug in gcc
<doogie> jt: get gcc removed from that arch. :)

"Nominal fee". What an ugly sentence. It's one of those things that
implies that if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
-- Linus Torvalds

<knghtbrd> joeyh: I was down since midmorning yesterday and pacbell said
this morning that AT&T was to blame and almost all of the state
was down
<rcw> dunno why people insist the internet can survive a nuclear holocaust
when it can't survive a backhoe

Feb 5 13:27:01 trinity lp0 on fire
-- the Linux kernel, alerting me that there was some unknown
problem with my printer (ie, it was out of ink)

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as
good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the
whole process.
-- John Carmack

It's not usually cost effective time wise to go do it. But if something's
really pissing you off, you just go find the code and fix it and that's
really cool.
-- John Carmack, on the advantages of open source

Granted, Win95's look wasn't all that new either - Apple tried to sue
Microsoft for copying the Macintosh UI / trash can icon, until Microsoft
pointed out that Apple got many of its Mac ideas (including the trash can
icon) from Xerox ParcPlace. Xerox is probably still wondering why
everyone is interested in their trash cans.
-- Danny Thorpe, Borland Delphi R&R

<knghtbrd> is it a sign of mental illness to wander aimlessly through the
start map, collect your Thunderbolt, hop in the pool, and gib
yourself with it just to see your head buouce when it falls
through the bottom of the pool? =>
<knghtbrd> "You know you're a Quake addict when ..."

<Zoid> I still think you guys are nuts merging Q and QW. :P
<knghtbrd> Of course we're nuts. Even John said so. =>
<taniwha> Zoid: we're nuts, but we're productive nuts:)

I am practicing a fine point of ethics. It is acceptable to shoot back.
It is not acceptable to shoot first.
-- Zed Pobre

<Endy> taniwha: Have you TESTED this one? :)
<taniwha> Endy: of course not

<Mercury> You don't have to be crazy to be a member of the project, but
you will be.. <=:]

* shortc wants to get in one of knghtbrd's sigs one of these days.

<Ze0> so, how's everything in the world of Quack?
<LordHavoc> just ducky
<Ze0> excellent, fried duck is mighty fine tasty.

<Deek> Exactly how much of a PITA is this in C?
<Knghtbrd> It's written in C++.
<Deek> Hence my question.
<Knghtbrd> I could do something like it in C. Anyone who saw the results
would think I was either a genius or out of my fucking mind.
They'd be right on either count.

<LackOfKan> What are 'bots'?
<``Erik> rsg is a bot, not a human, not a human usable client, just a bot.
<``Erik> about the same as a quake bot, except irc bots are (usually)
built to help, not shoot your ass full of holes

Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

<rebelpacket> hey, quick question, is there any way to speed up the
performance of uquake-x11?
<Deek> rebelpacket: If you want to accelerate it, throw it harder.

<Knghtbrd> Even with overbrights, Quake's color palette is full of dull,
flat colors
<LordHavoc> knghtbrd: quake's palette is very vibrant unless you use gamma
correction
<LordHavoc> well actually I agree, it's nowhere near as vibrant as Unreal
<Deek> Q3 on the other hand...NEON.
<LordHavoc> Q3 is just ridiculous
<Deek> Q3 takes the medieval church-dungeon and puts it in Vegas.

<Deek> Yes, America is a country based on how pissed-off a group of taxed
people can get.
<Deek> We exist as a country because we're cheap.

<Oskuro> Overfiend: many patches on top of 4.0.1 already?
<Overfiend> Oskuro: a few
<Overfiend> only 152 megs

<Deek> "A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language."
<Deek> knghtbrd has proven that you can write C++ in any language too.
<grin>
<Mercury> We are currently considdering if we should give him or prize, or
kill him..
<Mercury> (Of course, by all rights, this means we should give him the
prize, and then kill him.. <G>)

A friend of mine has a barcode on his arm.
He rings up as a $.35 pack of JuicyFruit.
-- Seen on Slashdot

"Debian: no hats or reptiles were harmed in the making of this distribution=
."
-- Paul Slootman

* knghtbrd ponders how to scare the living shit out of 87 people at once..
<knghtbrd> AHH! I can do it in 3 words!:
<knghtbrd> Microsoft Visual COBOL.

* athener calls Amnesty International House of Pancakes

<Culus_> We are also hoping to release a version of linux where shell is
replaced by perl to a large degree. Adding to that, there are a
few of us who would like to see a pure perl platform.. PerlOS :)
* Culus_ looks on in horror
<mstone> Culus_: on the up side, you can type damn near anything in at the
command prompt :)

<Mercury> LordHavoc: The reason why GL has overdraw is because it is only
using HALF of the system they designed for vis.
<Mercury> LordHavoc: Shooting itself in the foot.
* Dabb looks at all those bullet holes in his shoes - damn, lots :)

<mao> why do they insist on ading -Werror...
<Misty-chan> Mesa would not compile out of the box if it were done by you
guys ;)
<knghtbrd> Uh, Mesa DOESN'T compile out of the box most of the time.

<Deek> nopcode: No, it isn't. Win32 lacks the equivalent of fork().
<Knghtbrd> Deek: windoze is not meant for people who should have access to
sharp objects, hence no fork()
<Knghtbrd> instead, you must rely on spoon()

<pv2b> oh, besides, whats the best approach if i want to make a Quake
level designed from an existing building?
<Knghtbrd> Get a floorplan of Brian's office? =)
<pv2b> Knghtbrd: im considering my school.
<Knghtbrd> Oh great
<Knghtbrd> That's ALL we need

<doogie> Culus: my bug with openssh appears to be fixed in 2.5.2, but
master runs 2.3.0
<Culus> Don't even start
<doogie> I just did.
<Culus> You guys are going to drive me to build a huge giant robot and
destroy all of texas, aren't you?

* Equivalent code is available from RSA Data Security, Inc.
* This code has been tested against that, and is equivalent,
* except that you don't need to include two pages of legalese
* with every copy.
-- public domain MD5 source

* knghtbrd is gone - zzz - messages will be snapped like wet towels at allof the people who have stolen the trademark knghtbrd away message
<Coderjoe> ack
* Coderjoe prepares to defend himself from wet messages

Never underestimate the power of somebody with source code, a text editor,
and the willingness to totally hose their system.
-- Rob Landley <telomerase@yahoo.com>

<Addi> Alter.net seems to have replaced one of its router with a zucchini.

<taniwha> Knghtbrd: it's not bloat if it's used
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: how do you explain windoze then?
<taniwha> Knghtbrd: most of it is used only as ballast to make sure your
harddrive is full
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: ballast... Isn't that what makes subs sink to the
bottom of the ocean?
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: that would explain why winboxes are always going down.

innovate /IN no vait/ vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology
through purchase, imitation, or theft and to integrate it into a
de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity
but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To
lock-out competitors or to lock-in users. 4. To charge more money; to
increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other
companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or
manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7.
To evade liability for wrong-doings; to get off. 8. To purchase
legislation, legislators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To
mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power
(coup d'Útat). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym).
-- csbruce, in a Slashdot post

The deafening silence taught me not to ask a bunch of geeks for advice
from their girlfriends

<Deek> That reminds me, we'll need to buy a chainsaw for the office. "In
case of emergency, break glass"

<knghtbrd> He's a about half the size of the others.
<knghtbrd> But he's got a chainsaw.

<ExMachina> glQuakeIIIRendererMode(GL_TRUE)
<Knghtbrd> ExMachina: isn't that part of the extension which provides
glDriverBugs(GL_FALSE); ?
<Siigron> Knghtbrd: no, glDriverBugs() is part of EXT_help_me.
<Siigron> which also contains glMakeItWork(GL_PLEASE);

<wli> Yeah, I looked at esd and it looked like the kind of C code that an
ex-JOVIAL/Algol '60 coder who had spent the last 20 years bouncing
between Fortran-IV and Fortran '77 would write.

<nonlinear> .net is microsofts perverted version of a java networked
environment uglified for windows-specific crap

<|Rain|> *nod* I'm not fond of using smarthosts, myself
<|Rain|> as it relies on both the remote host and your host being smart
<|Rain|> and too often you miss one of both of those goals

The sourceforge approach is to place all of the projects in some bland
"open source surburbia", where all of the houses are alike, with only the
colors and minor style variations (which building plan was used for which
particular house) are allowed by the restrictive covenants and local
zoning laws. Sourceforege is the open source equivalent of the
subdivision in the movie "Edward Scissorhands".
-- Terry Lambert

"Since it's a foregone conclusion that Microsoft will be littering its XML
with pointers to Win32-based components, the best that can be said about
its adoption of XML is that it will make it easier for browsers and
applications on non-Windows platforms to understand which parts of the
document it must ignore."
-- Nicholas Petreley, "Computerworld", 3 September, 2001

Isn't it embarrassing when you have to go to the drugstore for some
"special items", and when you're checking out, the cashier looks at you
like, "oh, I know what YOU'RE doing tonight..."

Yep, that cashier read all the signs... canned chicken soup, TheraFlu,
Halls, NyQuil, the bigass bottles of OJ and grapefruit juice... he knew
and I knew that I had a date with the teevee and a down comforter. Awww
yeah.
-- Elizabeth Kirkindall

<LordHavoc> the majority of windoze artists do not have the ability to
save xpm
<Mercury> LordHavoc: They don't have notepad? *G,D&R*

Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason
that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it
English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish
a sufficiently broad range of tasks.
-- Bill Garrett

<Sammy> that's *IT*. I'm never fucking attempting to install redhat
again.
<Sammy> this is like the 10th fucking machine on which the installer has
imploded immediately after I went through the hell of their
package selection process.
<timball> Sammy: just use debian and never look back
<Sammy> timball: debian iso's are being written at this very moment.

<Electro> my computer was once one of the building blocks of a great
pyramid

<markm> c++: the power, elegance and simplicity of a hand grenade

<Mercury> Knghtbrd: Hey, perl has the power grace and elegance of a sledge
hammer. (=:]
<|Rain|> certainly the grace and elegance, anyway

<Overfiend> this is the New Overfiend, preacher of Love and Tolerance

<Knghtbrd> "... you will more than likely see all kinds of compiler
warnings scrolling by on the screen. These are normal and can
be safely ignored."
<LordHavoc> Knghtbrd: is that a note attached to some M$ code?
<Knghtbrd> No, it's a note about a bunch of GNU stuff.

## a_nick (nobody@c213-89-87-111.cm-upc.chello.se) has joined #python
<a_nick> how do i add a new key to a dictionary?
<a_nick> nm
<dash> heh :)
<dash> behold the problem-solving power of #python.

<hop_> i had something that i think was chicken that was coated with a red
paste that seemed to be composed of lye based on how much of my
tounge it burned away.
<hop_> our friend who is Indian said this is why most Indians are thin
and i quote "It doesn't take very much of this food to get you
satisfied enoguh to stop eating."

<Intention> "It's classic percolate-up economics, recognizing that money
is like manure: It works best if you spread it around."
<Knghtbrd> Intention: Carter's correlation: People with lots of either
usually smell funny
<Intention> Knghtbrd: You SO win.

4.2 BSD UNIX #57: Sun Jun 1 23:02:07 EDT 1986

You swing at the Sun. You miss. The Sun swings. He hits you with a
575MB disk! You read the 575MB disk. It is written in an alien
tongue and cannot be read by your tired Sun-2 eyes. You throw the
575MB disk at the Sun. You hit! The Sun must repair your eyes. The
Sun reads a scroll. He hits your 130MB disk! He has defeated the
130MB disk! The Sun reads a scroll. He hits your Ethernet board! He
has defeated your Ethernet board! You read a scroll of "postpone until
Monday at 9 AM". Everything goes dark...
-- /etc/motd, cbosgd

A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are on
a photo-safari in Africa. As they're driving along the savannah in their
jeep, they stop and scout the horizon with their binoculars.

The biologist: "Look! A herd of zebras! And there's a white zebra!
Fantastic! We'll be famous!"
The statistician: "Hey, calm down, it's not significant. We only know
there's one white zebra."
The mathematician: "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is
white on one side."
The computer scientist : "Oh, no! A special case!"

... A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you
have turned into a pile of dust.

A certain monk had a habit of pestering the Grand Tortue (the only one who
had ever reached the Enlightenment 'Yond Enlightenment), by asking whether
various objects had Buddha-nature or not. To such a question Tortue
invariably sat silent. The monk had already asked about a bean, a lake,
and a moonlit night. One day he brought to Tortue a piece of string, and
asked the same question. In reply, the Grand Tortue grasped the loop
between his feet and, with a few simple manipulations, created a complex
string which he proferred wordlessly to the monk. At that moment, the monk
was enlightened.

From then on, the monk did not bother Tortue. Instead, he made string after
string by Tortue's method; and he passed the method on to his own disciples,
who passed it on to theirs.

[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
-- Joseph Campbell

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention,
with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequilla.
-- Mitch Ratcliffe

A computer salesman visits a company president for the purpose of selling
the president one of the latest talking computers.
Salesman: "This machine knows everything. I can ask it any question
and it'll give the correct answer. Computer, what is the
speed of light?"
Computer: 186,282 miles per second.
Salesman: "Who was the first president of the United States?"
Computer: George Washington.
President: "I'm still not convinced. Let me ask a question.
Where is my father?"
Computer: Your father is fishing in Georgia.
President: "Hah!! The computer is wrong. My father died over twenty
years ago!"
Computer: Your mother's husband died 22 years ago. Your father just
landed a twelve pound bass.

A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake
without ketchup and mustard.

A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating
his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said
the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the
toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too".

A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about
whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they
got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The
medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's
rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat."
The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden
itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden
and the world were created. So God must have been an architect."
The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then
commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"

A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox
1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to
help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse,
and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I
see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the backof the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head
with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.

A Fortran compiler is the hobgoblin of little minis.

A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work
by being declared to work.
-- Anatol Holt

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
-- Alan Perlis

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems
have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects,
those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are
the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix,
APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them
with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.
-- Fred Brooks

A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master,
Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found. "Where is the
wise one named Knuth?" he asked a passing student.
"Ah," said the student, "you have not heard. He has gone on a
pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new
disciples."
Hearing this, the man was Enlightened.

A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the
program on which he was working. "I will be finished tomorrow," the programmer
promptly replied.
"I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager. "Truthfully,
how long will it take?"
The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish
to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.
"Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be
satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."
The programmer agreed to this.
Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his
retirement lunch, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal.
He had been programming all night.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him
invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the
manager retained his job.
The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer
refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I though it was an interesting
concept, and thus I expect no reward."
The manager, upon hearing this, remarked, "This programmer, though he
holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an
employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!"
But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist
so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste
everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working on."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A manager went to his programmers and told them: "As regards to your
work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave
at five in the afternoon." At this, all of them became angry and several
resigned on the spot.
So the manager said: "All right, in that case you may set your own
working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule." The
programmers, now satisfied, began to come in a noon and work to the wee
hours of the morning.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements
document for a new application. The manager asked the master: "How long will
it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"
"It will take one year," said the master promptly.
"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it
take it I assign ten programmers to it?"
The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."
"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"
The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be
completed," he said.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master
noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me",
he said, "may I examine it?"
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master.
"I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium,
and Hard", said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play,
where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the
human."
"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this
mysterious setting?"
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot.
And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices.
"The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant,"
said the master.
"Is Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.
"It is," came the reply.
"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.
"It is even in a video game," said the master.
"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"
The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson
is over for today," he said.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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you should blame when you make a mistake.

Yes, I want the brochure describing this incredible offer.
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*** Our Slogan: Top down programming for the masses. ***

A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs,
documents, or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of
the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"
The Master replies: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has
gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system
crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the
need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He
has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within
themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has
entered the mystery of the Tao."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A novice asked the master: "I have a program that sometimes runs and
sometimes aborts. I have followed the rules of programming, yet I am totally
baffled. What is the reason for this?"
The master replied: "You are confused because you do not understand
the Tao. Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why
do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers
simulate determinism; only the Tao is perfect.
The rules of programming are transitory; only the Tao is eternal.
Therefore you must contemplate the Tao before you receive enlightenment."
"But how will I know when I have received enlightenment?" asked the
novice.
"Your program will then run correctly," replied the master.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A novice asked the master: "I perceive that one computer company is
much larger than all others. It towers above its competition like a giant
among dwarfs. Any one of its divisions could comprise an entire business.
Why is this so?"
The master replied, "Why do you ask such foolish questions? That
company is large because it is so large. If it only made hardware, nobody
would buy it. If it only maintained systems, people would treat it like a
servant. But because it combines all of these things, people think it oneof the gods! By not seeking to strive, it conquers without effort."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A novice asked the master: "In the east there is a great tree-structure
that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with
vice-presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying
'Go, Hence!' or 'Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new
names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an
unnatural entity exist?"
The master replies: "You perceive this immense structure and are
disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from
its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming
beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A novice of the temple once approached the Chief Priest with a
question.
"Master, does Emacs have the Buddha nature?" the novice asked.
The Chief Priest had been in the temple for many years and could be
relied upon to know these things. He thought for several minutes before
replying.
"I don't see why not. It's got bloody well everything else."
With that, the Chief Priest went to lunch. The novice suddenly
achieved enlightenment, several years later.

Commentary:

His Master is kind,
Answering his FAQ quickly,
With thought and sarcasm.

A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial
package.
The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master
reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a setof generalized graphics routines, and artificial intelligence interface,
but not the slightest mention of anything financial.
When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant.
"Don't be so impatient," he said, "I'll put the financial stuff in eventually."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understandingof what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The
machine worked.

A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well
schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer.
-- Donald Knuth

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a
strings of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained
throughout. There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless
loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming
rigidity.
A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this
law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the
way that astonishes him least.
A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit. The
program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward
appearances.
If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of
disorder and confusion. The only way to correct this is to rewrite the
program.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software
conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sortof programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were
unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their
clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suites and they
made rude noises during my presentation."
The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference.
Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd,
an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations.
Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother
with social conventions?"
"They are alive within the Tao."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of
being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of
incomprehensible answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague
assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents
and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of
dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of
annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was
unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.
-- IEEE Grid newsmagazine

A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen
objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer
scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration
needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects.

A sheet of paper crossed my desk the other day and as I read it,
realization of a basic truth came over me. So simple! So obvious we couldn't
see it. John Knivlen, Chairman of Polamar Repeater Club, an amateur radio
group, had discovered how IC circuits work. He says that smoke is the thing
that makes ICs work because every time you let the smoke out of an IC circuit,
it stops working. He claims to have verified this with thorough testing.
I was flabbergasted! Of course! Smoke makes all things electrical
work. Remember the last time smoke escaped from your Lucas voltage regulator
Didn't it quit working? I sat and smiled like an idiot as more of the truth
dawned. It's the wiring harness that carries the smoke from one device to
another in your Mini, MG or Jag. And when the harness springs a leak, it lets
the smoke out of everything at once, and then nothing works. The starter motor
requires large quantities of smoke to operate properly, and that's why the wire
going to it is so large.
Feeling very smug, I continued to expand my hypothesis. Why are Lucas
electronics more likely to leak than say Bosch? Hmmm... Aha!!! Lucas is
British, and all things British leak! British convertible tops leak water,
British engines leak oil, British displacer units leak hydrostatic fluid, and
I might add Brititsh tires leak air, and the British defense unit leaks
secrets... so naturally British electronics leak smoke.
-- Jack Banton, PCC Automotive Electrical School

[Ummm ... IC circuits? Integrated circuit circuits?]

A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt.
As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true", asked the
student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before
the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit
the student with a stick.

A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something
undreamed of by its author.
-- S. C. Johnson

A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing steam does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.

These are great mysteries.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt
ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
-- Edsger Dijkstra

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
-- F. Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month"

Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by
close application thereto, it is worse execute by two persons and
scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.
-- George Washington, 1732-1799

After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home
directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /u/lars, across the surface of the
Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had Luke stop at the
edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program;" said PDP-1. "You will never find a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
-- DECWARS

Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether
machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about
as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
-- Dijkstra

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts
those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundredsof nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end
goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger,
and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works,
the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found
the last bug."
-- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

A new system, the CIRCULATORY system, has been added.

The long-experimental CIRCULATORY system has been released to users. The
Lisp Machine uses Type B fluid, the L machine uses Type A fluid. When the
switch to Common Lisp occurs both machines will, of course, be Type O.
Please check fluid level by using the DIP stick which is located in the
back of VMI monitors. Unchecked low fluid levels can cause poor paging
performance.

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

Bug reports now amount to an average of 12,853 per day. Unfortunately,
this is only a small fraction [ < 1% ] of the mail volume we receive. In
order that we may more expeditiously deal with these valuable messages,
please communicate them by one of the following paths:

* Our very rich lawyers have assured us that we are not
responsible for any errors or advice given over the phone.

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

CAR and CDR now return extra values.

The function CAR now returns two values. Since it has to go to the trouble
to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as
well get both halves at once. For example, the following code shows how to
destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR):

(MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...)

For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the
object. In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been
fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack. This should
hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because
it cold boots the machine so often.

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

Compiler optimizations have been made to macro expand LET into a WITHOUT-
INTERRUPTS special form so that it can PUSH things into a stack in the
LET-OPTIMIZATION area, SETQ the variables and then POP them back when it's
done. Don't worry about this unless you use multiprocessing.
Note that LET *could* have been defined by:

(LET ((LET '`(LET ((LET ',LET))
,LET)))
`(LET ((LET ',LET))
,LET))

This is believed to speed up execution by as much as a factor of 1.01 or
3.50 depending on whether you believe our friendly marketing representatives.
This code was written by a new programmer here (we snatched him away from
Itty Bitti Machines where he was writing COUGHBOL code) so to give him
confidence we trusted his vows of "it works pretty well" and installed it.

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

JCL support as alternative to system menu.

In our continuing effort to support languages other than LISP on the CADDR,
we have developed an OS/360-compatible JCL. This can be used as an
alternative to the standard system menu. Type System J to get to a JCL
interactive read-execute-diagnose loop window. [Note that for 360
compatibility, all input lines are truncated to 80 characters.] This
window also maintains a mouse-sensitive display of critical job parameters
such as dataset allocation, core allocation, channels, etc. When a JCL
syntax error is detected or your job ABENDs, the window-oriented JCL
debugger is entered. The JCL debugger displays appropriate OS/360 error
messages (such as IEC703, "disk error") and allows you to dequeue your job.

=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ========================

The garbage collector now works. In addition a new, experimental garbage
collection algorithm has been installed. With SI:%DSK-GC-QLX-BITS set to 17,
(NOT the default) the old garbage collection algorithm remains in force; when
virtual storage is filled, the machine cold boots itself. With SI:%DSK-GC-
QLX-BITS set to 23, the new garbage collector is enabled. Unlike most garbage
collectors, the new gc starts its mark phase from the mind of the user, rather
than from the obarray. This allows the garbage collection of significantly
more Qs. As the garbage collector runs, it may ask you something like "Do you
remember what SI:RDTBL-TRANS does?", and if you can't give a reasonable answer
in thirty seconds, the symbol becomes a candidate for GCing. The variable
SI:%GC-QLX-LUSER-TM governs how long the GC waits before timing out the user.

AmigaDOS Beer: The company has gone out of business, but their recipe has
been picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer will be an
import. This beer never really sold very well because the original
manufacturer didn't understand marketing. Like Unix Beer, AmigaDOS Beer
fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. It originally came in a
16-oz. can, but now comes in 32-oz. cans too. When this can was
originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design
hasn't changed much over the years, so it appears dated now. Critics of
this beer claim that it is only meant for watching TV anyway.

... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a
programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting
down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That
behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and
never when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal
know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though,
know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to
hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static
electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.
An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:
the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a
touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led
astray by hunting and pecking.
-- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985

An interpretation _I satisfies a sentence in the table language if and only if
each entry in the table designates the value of the function designated by the
function constant in the upper-left corner applied to the objects designated
by the corresponding row and column labels.
-- Genesereth & Nilsson, "Logical foundations of Artificial
Intelligence"

... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any
resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The
question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them
is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of
the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A
discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scopeof this article.)

Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you
that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?"
is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime
mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress.
-- Elizabeth Zwicky

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the
future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generationof coding bums.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming;
...and is best for educational purposes.
-- A. Perlis

APL is a write-only language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't
read any of them.
-- Roy Keir

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

As in Protestant Europe, by contrast, where sects divided endlessly into
smaller competing sects and no church dominated any other, all is different
in the fragmented world of IBM. That realm is now a chaos of conflicting
norms and standards that not even IBM can hope to control. You can buy a
computer that works like an IBM machine but contains nothing made or sold by
IBM itself. Renegades from IBM constantly set up rival firms and establish
standards of their own. When IBM recently abandoned some of its original
standards and decreed new ones, many of its rivals declared a puritan
allegiance to IBM's original faith, and denounced the company as a divisive
innovator. Still, the IBM world is united by its distrust of icons and
imagery. IBM's screens are designed for language, not pictures. Graven
images may be tolerated by the luxurious cults, but the true IBM faith relies
on the austerity of the word.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988

As of next Thursday, UNIX will be flushed in favor of TOPS-10.
Please update your programs.

As of next Tuesday, C will be flushed in favor of COBOL.
Please update your programs.

As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.

As part of an ongoing effort to keep you, the Fortune reader, abreast of
the valuable information the daily crosses the USENET, Fortune presents:

News articles that answer *your* questions, #1:

Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: how do I run C code received from sources
Keywords: C sources
Distribution: na

I do not know how to run the C programs that are posted in the
sources newsgroup. I save the files, edit them to remove the
headers, and change the mode so that they are executable, but I
cannot get them to run. (I have never written a C program before.)

Must they be compiled? With what compiler? How do I do this? If
I compile them, is an object code file generated or must I generate
it explicitly with the > character? Is there something else that
must be done?

As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs;
a process that traditionally requires some debugging.
-- USA Today, referring to the Internal Revenue Service
conversion to a new computer system.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't
as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be
discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large
part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in
my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949

As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear,
bearing hot new versions of their pieces -- faster, smaller, more complete,
or putatively less buggy. The replacement of a working component by a new
version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new
component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and
efficient test cases will usually be available.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"

As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there
is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity
and understanding of how computers work that it provides.
-- D. Gries

Asynchronous inputs are at the root of our race problems.
-- D. Winker and F. Prosser

At about 2500 A.D., humankind discovers a computer problem that *must* be
solved. The only difficulty is that the problem is NP complete and will
take thousands of years even with the latest optical biologic technology
available. The best computer scientists sit down to think up some solution.
In great dismay, one of the C.S. people tells her husband about it. There
is only one solution, he says. Remember physics 103, Modern Physics, general
relativity and all. She replies, "What does that have to do with solving
a computer problem?"
"Remember the twin paradox?"
After a few minutes, she says, "I could put the computer on a very
fast machine and the computer would have just a few minutes to calculate but
that is the exact opposite of what we want... Of course! Leave the
computer here, and accelerate the earth!"
The problem was so important that they did exactly that. When
the earth came back, they were presented with the answer:

IEH032 Error in JOB Control Card.

At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on
the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is
quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather
than blinkers it.
-- G.L. Glegg, "The Design of Design"

At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find
at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.

BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-- Donald Knuth

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein

Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of
interest is easy.

Blinding speed can compensate for a lot of deficiencies.
-- David Nichols

Brace yourselves. We're about to try something that borders on the unique:
an actually rather serious technical book which is not only (gasp) vehemently
anti-Solemn, but also (shudder) takes sides. I tend to think of it as
`Constructive Snottiness.'
-- Mike Padlipsky, "Elements of Networking Style"

Breadth-first search is the bulldozer of science.
-- Randy Goebel

Brian Kernighan has an automobile which he helped design.
Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor
any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver.
Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the
center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will
usually know what's wrong."

But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
-- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"

By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other
designers in the thin disguise of good, clean fun.
-- P.J. Plauger, "Computer Language", 1988, April
Fool's column.

C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360.

... C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility of member
objects and member functions. Specifically, members may be placed in the
public, private, or protected parts of a class. Members declared in the
public parts are visible to all clients; members declared in the private
parts are fully encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts
are visible only to the class itself and its subclasses. C++ also supports
the notion of *_______friends*: cooperative classes that are permitted to see each
other's private parts.
-- Grady Booch, "Object Oriented Design with Applications"

CCI Power 6/40: one board, a megabyte of cache, and an attitude...

Coding is easy; All you do is sit staring at a terminal until the dropsof blood form on your forehead.

Comparing software engineering to classical engineering assumes that software
has the ability to wear out. Software typically behaves, or it does not. It
either works, or it does not. Software generally does not degrade, abrade,
stretch, twist, or ablate. To treat it as a physical entity, therefore, is
misapplication of our engineering skills. Classical engineering deals with
the characteristics of hardware; software engineering should deal with the
characteristics of *software*, and not with hardware or management.
-- Dan Klein

COMPASS [for the CDC-6000 series] is the sort of assembler one expects from
a corporation whose president codes in octal.
-- J.N. Gray

... computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since
civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price
gain in 30 years.
-- Fred Brooks

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in
the world that just don't add up.

Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed
from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"

Cosmotronic Software Unlimited Inc. does not warrant that the
functions contained in the program will meet your requirements or that
the operation of the program will be uninterrupted or error-free.
However, Cosmotronic Software Unlimited Inc. warrants the
diskette(s) on which the program is furnished to be of black color and
square shape under normal use for a period of ninety (90) days from the
date of purchase.
NOTE: IN NO EVENT WILL COSMOTRONIC SOFTWARE UNLIMITED OR ITS
DISTRIBUTORS AND THEIR DEALERS BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING
ANY LOST PROFIT, LOST SAVINGS, LOST PATIENCE OR OTHER INCIDENTAL OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES.
-- Horstmann Software Design, the "ChiWriter" user manual

Creating computer software is always a demanding and painstaking
process -- an exercise in logic, clear expression, and almost fanatical
attention to detail. It requires intelligence, dedication, and an
enormous amount of hard work. But, a certain amount of unpredictable
and often unrepeatable inspiration is what usually makes the difference
between adequacy and excellence.

Creating computer software is always a demanding and painstaking
process -- an exercise in logic, clear expression, and almost fanatical
attention to detail. It requires intelligence, dedication, and an
enormous amount of hard work. But, a certain amount of unpredictable
and often unrepeatable inspiration is what usually makes the difference
between adequacy and excellence.

Dear Emily:
How can I choose what groups to post in?
-- Confused

Dear Confused:
Pick as many as you can, so that you get the widest audience. After
all, the net exists to give you an audience. Ignore those who suggest you
should only use groups where you think the article is highly appropriate.
Pick all groups where anybody might even be slightly interested.
Always make sure followups go to all the groups. In the rare event
that you post a followup which contains something original, make sure you
expand the list of groups. Never include a "Followup-to:" line in the
header, since some people might miss part of the valuable discussion in
the fringe groups.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

Dear Emily:
I saw a long article that I wish to rebut carefully, what should
I do?
-- Angry

Dear Angry:
Include the entire text with your article, and include your comments
between the lines. Be sure to post, and not mail, even though your article
looks like a reply to the original. Everybody *loves* to read those long
point-by-point debates, especially when they evolve into name-calling and
lots of "Is too!" -- "Is not!" -- "Is too, twizot!" exchanges.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

Dear Emily:
I'm having a serious disagreement with somebody on the net. I
tried complaints to his sysadmin, organizing mail campaigns, called for
his removal from the net and phoning his employer to get him fired.
Everybody laughed at me. What can I do?
-- A Concerned Citizen

Dear Concerned:
Go to the daily papers. Most modern reporters are top-notch computer
experts who will understand the net, and your problems, perfectly. They
will print careful, reasoned stories without any errors at all, and surely
represent the situation properly to the public. The public will also all
act wisely, as they are also fully cognizant of the subtle nature of net
society.
Papers never sensationalize or distort, so be sure to point out things
like racism and sexism wherever they might exist. Be sure as well that they
understand that all things on the net, particularly insults, are meant
literally. Link what transpires on the net to the causes of the Holocaust, if
possible. If regular papers won't take the story, go to a tabloid paper --
they are always interested in good stories.

Dear Emily:
I'm still confused as to what groups articles should be posted
to. How about an example?
-- Still Confused

Dear Still:
Ok. Let's say you want to report that Gretzky has been traded from
the Oilers to the Kings. Now right away you might think rec.sport.hockey
would be enough. WRONG. Many more people might be interested. This is a
big trade! Since it's a NEWS article, it belongs in the news.* hierarchy
as well. If you are a news admin, or there is one on your machine, try
news.admin. If not, use news.misc.
The Oilers are probably interested in geology, so try sci.physics.
He is a big star, so post to sci.astro, and sci.space because they are also
interested in stars. Next, his name is Polish sounding. So post to
soc.culture.polish. But that group doesn't exist, so cross-post to
news.groups suggesting it should be created. With this many groups of
interest, your article will be quite bizarre, so post to talk.bizarre as
well. (And post to comp.std.mumps, since they hardly get any articles
there, and a "comp" group will propagate your article further.)
You may also find it is more fun to post the article once in each
group. If you list all the newsgroups in the same article, some newsreaders
will only show the the article to the reader once! Don't tolerate this.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

Dear Emily:
Today I posted an article and forgot to include my signature.
What should I do?
-- Forgetful

Dear Forgetful:
Rush to your terminal right away and post an article that says,
"Oops, I forgot to post my signature with that last article. Here
it is."
Since most people will have forgotten your earlier article,
(particularly since it dared to be so boring as to not have a nice, juicy
signature) this will remind them of it. Besides, people care much more
about the signature anyway.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

Dear Ms. Postnews:
I couldn't get mail through to somebody on another site. What
should I do?
-- Eager Beaver

Dear Eager:
No problem, just post your message to a group that a lot of people
read. Say, "This is for John Smith. I couldn't get mail through so I'm
posting it. All others please ignore."
This way tens of thousands of people will spend a few seconds scanning
over and ignoring your article, using up over 16 man-hours their collective
time, but you will be saved the terrible trouble of checking through usenet
maps or looking for alternate routes. Just think, if you couldn't distribute
your message to 9000 other computers, you might actually have to (gasp) call
directory assistance for 60 cents, or even phone the person. This can cost
as much as a few DOLLARS (!) for a 5 minute call!
And certainly it's better to spend 10 to 20 dollars of other people's
money distributing the message than for you to have to waste $9 on an overnight
letter, or even 25 cents on a stamp!
Don't forget. The world will end if your message doesn't get through,
so post it as many places as you can.
-- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

Dear Sir,
I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or
to the office, We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public
places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers
being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive un-
employment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J.P.
Sevenoaks
-- Letters To The Editor, The Times of London

Did you know that for the price of a 280-Z you can buy two Z-80's?
-- P.J. Plauger

Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.

DISCLAIMER:
Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsementof Western industrial civilization.

Do not meddle in the affairs of troff, for it is subtle and quick to anger.

Do not simplify the design of a program if a way can be found to make
it complex and wonderful.

*** DO YOU HAVE A RESTLESS URGE TO PROGRAM? ***
Do you want the instant respect that comes from being able to use technical
terms that nobody understands? Do you want to strike fear and loathing into
the hearts of DP managers everywhere? If so, then let the Famous Programmers'
School lead you on... into the world of professional computer programming.

*** IS PROGRAMMING FOR YOU? ***
Programming is not for everyone. But, if you have the desire to learn, we can
help you get started. All you need is the Famous Programmers' Course and
enough money to keep those lessons coming month after month.

*** TAKE OUR FREE APTITUDE TEST ***
To help determine if you are qualified to be a programmer, take a moment to
try this simple test:
(1) Write down the numbers from zero to nine and the first six lettersof the alphabet (Hint: 0123456789ABCDEF).
(2) Whose picture is on the back of a twenty-dollar bill?
(3) What is the state capital of Idaho?
If you managed to read all three questions without wondering why we asked
them, you may have a future as a computer programmer.

Documentation is the castor oil of programming.
Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much.

Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted?
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student?
Does a good father allow a single child to starve?
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code?
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

DOS Air:
All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it
until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again.
Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et
cetera.

DOS Beer: Requires you to use your own can opener, and requires you to
read the directions carefully before opening the can. Originally only
came in an 8-oz. can, but now comes in a 16-oz. can. However, the can is
divided into 8 compartments of 2 oz. each, which have to be accessed
separately. Soon to be discontinued, although a lot of people are going
to keep drinking it after it's no longer available.

Due to lack of disk space, this fortune database has been discontinued.

Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs.
-- Kernighan

Each of these cults correspond to one of the two antagonists in the age of
Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in Catholic Europe,
worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with "icons." All is sound and
imagery and Appledom. Even words look like decorative filigrees in exotic
typefaces. The greatest icon of all, the inviolable Apple itself, stands in
the dominate position at the upper-left corner of the screen. A central
corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices.
Infalliable doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs
in a sealed boardroom. Should anyone in his curia question his powers, the
offender is excommunicated into outer darkness. The expelled heretic founds
a new company, mutters obscurely of the coming age and the next computer,
then disappears into silence, taking his stockholders with him. The mother
company forbids financial competition as sternly as it stifles ideological
competition; if you want to use computer programs that conform to Apple's
orthodoxy, you must buy a computer made and sold by Apple itself.
-- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because
God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software
engineer.
-- Fred Brooks

Established technology tends to persist in the face of new technology.
-- G. Blaauw, one of the designers of System 360

Eudaemonic research proceeded with the casual mania peculiar to this part of
the world. Nude sunbathing on the back deck was combined with phone calls to
Advanced Kinetics in Costa Mesa, American Laser Systems in Goleta, Automation
Industries in Danbury, Connecticut, Arenberg Ultrasonics in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts, and Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California, where Norman
Packard's cousin, David, presided as chairman of the board. The trick was to
make these calls at noon, in the hope that out-to-lunch executives would return
them at their own expense. Eudaemonic Enterprises, for all they knew, might be
a fast-growing computer company branching out of the Silicon Valley. Sniffing
the possibility of high-volume sales, these executives little suspected that
they were talking on the other end of the line to a naked physicist crazed
over roulette.
-- Thomas Bass, "The Eudaemonic Pie"

Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer
technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation.
The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in
computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long
Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis-
trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth. At Harvard
one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the
"granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I. "Things were going badly;
there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed
computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using
ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when
anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." Hopper
said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred
them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons
Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in
question."
[actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in
regard to problems with radio hardware. Ed.]

"Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one
idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's
sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that allof the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated,
caustic twits."
-- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet

Every program is a part of some other program, and rarely fits.

Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper ... everyone was
eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is
bend a disk.
-- A member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity,
commenting on the benefits of using computers in supportof their movement.

Excessive login or logout messages are a sure sign of senility.

Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring
you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter
to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or
other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the
list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add
yours to the bottom of the list.

Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San
Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find
his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent
out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to
build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at
this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in
her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's.

Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today!
For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if
you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or
not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is
that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip;
when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor
1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and
'\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear.
-- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80

Fly Windows NT:
All the passengers carry their seats out onto the tarmac, placing the chairs
in the outline of a plane. They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet
swooshing sounds as if they are flying.

"For that matter, compare your pocket computer with the massive jobs of
a thousand years ago. Why not, then, the last step of doing away with
computers altogether?"
-- Jehan Shuman

FORTRAN is a good example of a language which is easier to parse
using ad hoc techniques.
-- D. Gries
[What's good about it? Ed.]

Try:
ar t "God"
drink < bottle; opener (Bourne Shell)
cat "food in tin cans" (all but 4.[23]BSD)
Hey UNIX! Got a match? (V6 or C shell)
mkdir matter; cat > matter (Bourne Shell)
rm God
man: Why did you get a divorce? (C shell)
date me (anything up to 4.3BSD)
make "heads or tails of all this"
who is smart
(C shell)
If I had a ) for every dollar of the national debt, what would I have?
sleep with me (anything up to 4.3BSD)

fortune: cannot execute. Out of cookies.

[From the operation manual for the CI-300 Dot Matrix Line Printer, made
in Japan]:

The excellent output machine of MODEL CI-300 as extraordinary DOT MATRIX
LINE PRINTER, built in two MICRO-PROCESSORs as well as EAROM, is featured by
permitting wonderful co-existence such as; "high quality against low cost,"
"diversified functions with compact design," "flexibility in accessibleness
and durability of approx. 2000,000,00 Dot/Head," "being sophisticated in
mechanism but possibly agile operating under noises being extremely
suppressed" etc.

And as a matter of course, the final goal is just simply to help achieve
"super shuttle diplomacy" between cool data, perhaps earned by HOST
COMPUTER, and warm heart of human being.

From the Pro 350 Pocket Service Guide, p. 49, Step 5 of the
instructions on removing an I/O board from the card cage, comes a new
experience in sound:

5. Turn the handle to the right 90 degrees. The pin-spreading
sound is normal for this type of connector.

GIVE: Support the helpless victims of computer error.

Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages
whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits
LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.

Grand Master Turing once dreamed that he was a machine. When he awoke
he exclaimed:
"I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine,
or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!"
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Hacker's Guide To Cooking:
2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't
really come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.)
1 tsp. vanilla extract (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty
strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure)
1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too)
8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you
can squirt all over your friends and lick off...)
"Blend all together until creamy with no lumps." This is where you get to
join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through
merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy
and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it. Try an electric
beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off
the ceiling(3m).
"Pour into a graham cracker crust..." Aha, the BUGS section at last. You
just happened to have a GCC sitting around under /etc/food, right?
If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent
GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter.
"...and refrigerate for an hour." Leave the recipe's stdout in a fridge
for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and
by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin.

Hackers of the world, unite!

Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You
are the Yin and I am the Yang. If we travel together we will become famous
and earn vast sums of money." And so the pair set forth together, thinking
to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags, and
hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao
lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does
not seek fame, therefore nobody knows its presence. It does not seeks fortune,
for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

"Has anyone had problems with the computer accounts?"
"Yes, I don't have one."
"Okay, you can send mail to one of the tutors ..."
-- E. D'Azevedo, Computer Science 372

Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are
typed with the left hand? Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter
keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even useof both hands. It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is
not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears.

He's like a function -- he returns a value, in the form of his opinion.
It's up to you to cast it into a void or not.
-- Phil Lapsley

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.
-- Dennis Ritchie

I asked the engineer who designed the communication terminal's keyboards
why these were not manufactured in a central facility, in view of the
small number needed [1 per month] in his factory. He explained that this
would be contrary to the political concept of local self-sufficiency.
Therefore, each factory needing keyboards, no matter how few, manufactures
them completely, even molding the keypads.
-- Isaac Auerbach, IEEE "Computer", Nov. 1979

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rateof 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
-- F. H. Wales (1936)

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov

I had the rare misfortune of being one of the first people to try and
implement a PL/1 compiler.
-- T. Cheatham

I have sacrificed time, health, and fortune, in the desire to complete these
Calculating Engines. I have also declined several offers of great personal
advantage to myself. But, notwithstanding the sacrifice of these advantages
for the purpose of maturing an engine of almost intellectual power, and
after expending from my own private fortune a larger sum than the governmentof England has spent on that machine, the execution of which it only
commenced, I have received neither an acknowledgement of my labors, not even
the offer of those honors or rewards which are allowed to fall within the
reach of men who devote themselves to purely scientific investigations...
If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were
a mere triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the
execution of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some
justification might be found for the course which has been taken; but I
venture to assert that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will
ever publicly express an opinion that such a machine would be useless if
made, and that no man distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to
declare the construction of such machinery impracticable...
And at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed
by that exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its
advancement, which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I
think the application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse
calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country.
In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not
be economized by the aid of machinery.
-- Charles Babbage, "The Life of a Philosopher"

I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with
the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest
authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year.
-- Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall
publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior
editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new
science of data processing), c. 1957

I think there's a world market for about five computers.
-- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943

I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained
it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass
stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold.
I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be
absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had
developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case.
Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's
temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I
chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to
the point where it would not run at all.
-- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black
Holes and the Fate of Stars"

I'm not even going to *______bother* comparing C to BASIC or FORTRAN.
-- L. Zolman, creator of BDS C

I'm still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.

I'm sure that VMS is completely documented, I just haven't found the
right manual yet. I've been working my way through the manuals in the document
library and I'm half way through the second cabinet, (3 shelves to go), so I
should find what I'm looking for by mid May. I hope I can remember what it
was by the time I find it.
I had this idea for a new horror film, "VMS Manuals from Hell" or maybe
"The Paper Chase : IBM vs. DEC". It's based on Hitchcock's "The Birds", except
that it's centered around a programmer who is attacked by a swarm of binder
pages with an index number and the single line "This page intentionally left
blank."
-- Alex Crain

IBM Advanced Systems Group -- a bunch of mindless jerks, who'll be first
against the wall when the revolution comes...
-- with regrets to D. Adams

If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape
at about 30 miles/second.
-- Grishman, Assembly Language Programming

If a group of _N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be _N-1
passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager.
-- T. Cheatham

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever
to get a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude
that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.
-- Rob Stampfli

If graphics hackers are so smart, why can't they get the bugs out of
fresh paint?

If he once again pushes up his sleeves in order to compute for 3 days
and 3 nights in a row, he will spend a quarter of an hour before to
think which principles of computation shall be most appropriate.
-- Voltaire, "Diatribe du docteur Akakia"

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton

In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with
the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on
my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson

It has been said that physicists stand on one another's shoulders. If
this is the case, then programmers stand on one another's toes, and
software engineers dig each other's graves.
-- Unknown

If just one piece of mail gets lost, well, they'll just think they forgot
to send it. But if *two* pieces of mail get lost, hell, they'll just think
the other guy hasn't gotten around to answering his mail. And if *fifty*
pieces of mail get lost, can you imagine it, if *fifty* pieces of mail get
lost, why they'll think someone *else* is broken! And if 1Gb of mail gets
lost, they'll just *know* that Arpa [ucbarpa.berkeley.edu] is down and
think it's a conspiracy to keep them from their God given right to receive
Net Mail ...
-- Casey Leedom

If the designers of X-window built cars, there would be no fewer than five
steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same
principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful
feature, that.
-- From the programming notebooks of a heretic, 1990.

If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. If the
operating system is great, then the compiler is great. If the compiler
is great, then the application is great. If the application is great, then
the user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth
to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand
languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language
expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within
the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

If the vendors started doing everything right, we would be out of a job.
Let's hear it for OSI and X! With those babies in the wings, we can count
on being employed until we drop, or get smart and switch to gardening,
paper folding, or something.
-- C. Philip Wood

If you ever want to have a lot of fun, I recommend that you go off and program
an imbedded system. The salient characteristic of an imbedded system is that
it cannot be allowed to get into a state from which only direct intervention
will suffice to remove it. An imbedded system can't permanently trust anything
it hears from the outside world. It must sniff around, adapt, consider, sniff
around, and adapt again. I'm not talking about ordinary modular programming
carefulness here. No. Programming an imbedded system calls for undiluted
raging maniacal paranoia. For example, our ethernet front ends need to know
what network number they are on so that they can address and route PUPs
properly. How do you find out what your network number is? Easy, you ask a
gateway. Gateways are required by definition to know their correct network
numbers. Once you've got your network number, you start using it and before
you can blink you've got it wired into fifteen different sockets spread all
over creation. Now what happens when the panic-stricken operator realizes he
was running the wrong version of the gateway which was giving out the wrong
network number? Never supposed to happen. Tough. Supposing that your
software discovers that the gateway is now giving out a different network
number than before, what's it supposed to do about it? This is not discussed
in the protocol document. Never supposed to happen. Tough. I think you
get my drift.

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin

Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has
a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk
storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on
voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300.
What's the first question that the computer community asks?

"Is it PC compatible?"

**** IMPORTANT **** ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ****

Due to a recent systems overload error your recent disk files have been
erased. Therefore, in accordance with the UNIX Basic Manual, University of
Washington Geophysics Manual, and Bylaw 9(c), Section XII of the Revised
Federal Communications Act, you are being granted Temporary Disk Space,
valid for three months from this date, subject to the restrictions set forth
in Appendix II of the Federal Communications Handbook (18th edition) as well
as the references mentioned herein. You may apply for more disk space at any
time. Disk usage in or above the eighth percentile will secure the removalof all restrictions and you will immediately receive your permanent disk
space. Disk usage in the sixth or seventh percentile will not effect the
validity of your temporary disk space, though its expiration date may be
extended for a period of up to three months. A score in the fifth percentile
or below will result in the withdrawal of your Temporary Disk space.

In a display of perverse brilliance, Carl the repairman mistakes a room
humidifier for a mid-range computer but manages to tie it into the network
anyway.
-- The 5th Wave

In a surprise raid last night, federal agents ransacked a house in searchof a rebel computer hacker. However, they were unable to complete the arrest
because the warrant was made out in the name of Don Provan, while the only
person in the house was named don provan. Proving, once again, that Unix is
superior to Tops10.

In any problem, if you find yourself doing an infinite amount of work,
the answer may be obtained by inspection.

In fact, S. M. Simpson, eventually devised an efficient 24-point Fourier
transform, which was a precursor to the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform
in 1965. The FFT made all of Simpson's efficient autocorrelation and
spectrum programs instantly obsolete, on which he had worked half a lifetime.
-- Proc. IEEE, Sept. 1982, p.900

In less than a century, computers will be making substantial progress on
... the overriding problem of war and peace.
-- James Slagle

In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and
null, and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of
IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there
be registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they
carried; and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called
the data Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was
evening and there was morning, one interrupt.
-- Rico Tudor, "The Story of Creation or, The Myth of Urk"

In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time.
Therefore, Space and Time are the Yin and Yang of programming.

Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of
time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always
have enough time and space to accomplish their goals.
How could it be otherwise?
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he
sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
"Why is the net wired randomly?", inquired Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play".
At this Minsky shut his eyes, and Sussman asked his teacher "Why do
you close your eyes?"
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It
changes into a bird whose winds are like clouds filling the sky. When this
bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters.
This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull
making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with
the blue sky at its back, returns home.
The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands
it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears
its message. The master programmer continues to work at his terminal, for he
does not know that the bird has come and gone.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general
intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin
to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be
at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
incalculable ...
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970

It appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself
working as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates. One slow day, he
found that he had time to chat with the new entrants. To the first one
he asked, "What's your IQ?" The new arrival replied, "190". They
discussed Einstein's theory of relativity for hours. When the second
new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer's
IQ. The answer this time came "120". To which Einstein replied, "Tell
me, how did the Cubs do this year?" and they proceeded to talk for half
an hour or so. To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the
question, "What's your IQ?". Upon receiving the answer "70",
Einstein smiled and replied, "Got a minute to tell me about VMS 4.0?"

It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden
directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire.
During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the
Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with
enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's
sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0 races ~ aboard her shell script,
custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore
freedom and games to the network...
-- DECWARS

It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but
it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to
organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The
manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and
I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they
could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months,
three more than the schedule allowed.
The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they
could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating;
it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule.
Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling
their thumbs for ten months.
To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control
program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time,
but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and
it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual
integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would
estimate that it added a year to debugging time.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"

It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis

... it is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the
sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other
words... their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their
superficial design flaws.
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on the productsof the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

It is possible by ingenuity and at the expense of clarity... {to do almost
anything in any language}. However, the fact that it is possible to push
a pea up a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is a sensible
way of getting it there. Each of these techniques of language extension
should be used in its proper place.
-- Christopher Strachey

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students
that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small
price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of
a new system. For the initiator has the emnity of all who would profit
by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders
in those who would gain by the new ones.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513

It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built,
everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment
was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has
cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing.
There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never
really needed in the first place.
I expect every installation has its own pet software which is
analogous to the above.
-- K.E. Iverson, on the Leaning Tower of Pisa

It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the
system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine
some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very
sharp, probably not someone here on campus.
-- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in
Georgia Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm.

Keep the number of passes in a compiler to a minimum.
-- D. Gries

`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order
by staff writers

...
The central Superhighway site called ``sunsite.unc.edu''
collapsed in the morning before the release. News about the release had
been leaked by a German hacker group, Harmonious Hardware Hackers, who
had cracked into the author's computer earlier in the week. They had
got the release date wrong by one day, and caused dozens of eager fans
to connect to the sunsite computer at the wrong time. ``No computer can
handle that kind of stress,'' explained the mourning sunsite manager,
Erik Troan. ``The spinning disks made the whole computer jump, and
finally it crashed through the floor to the basement.'' Luckily,
repairs were swift and the computer was working again the same evening.
``Thank God we were able to buy enough needles and thread and patch it
together without major problems.'' The site has also installed a new
throttle on the network pipe, allowing at most four clients at the same
time, thus making a new crash less likely. ``The book is now in our
Incoming folder'', says Troan, ``and you're all welcome to come and get it.''
-- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi>
[comp.os.linux.announce]

`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order
by staff writers

...
The SAG is one of the major products developed via the Information
Superhighway, the brain child of Al Gore, US Vice President. The ISHW
is being developed with massive govenment funding, since studies show
that it already has more than four hundred users, three years before
the first prototypes are ready. Asked whether he was worried about the
foreign influence in an expensive American Dream, the vice president
said, ``Finland? Oh, we've already bought them, but we haven't told
anyone yet. They're great at building model airplanes as well. And _I
can spell potato.'' House representatives are not mollified, however,
wanting to see the terms of the deal first, fearing another Alaska.
Rumors about the SAG release have imbalanced the American stock
market for weeks. Several major publishing houses reached an all time
low in the New York Stock Exchange, while publicly competing for the
publishing agreement with Mr. Wirzenius. The negotiations did not work
out, tough. ``Not enough dough,'' says the author, although spokesmen
at both Prentice-Hall and Playboy, Inc., claim the author was incapableof expressing his wishes in a coherent form during face to face talks,
preferring to communicate via e-mail. ``He kept muttering something
about jiffies and pegs,'' they say.
...
-- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi>
[comp.os.linux.announce]

`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order
by staff writers

Helsinki, Finland, August 6, 1995 -- In a surprise movement, Lars
``Lasu'' Wirzenius today released the 0.3 edition of the ``Linux System
Administrators' Guide''. Already an industry non-classic, the new
version sports such overwhelming features as an overview of a Linux
system, a completely new climbing session in a tree, and a list of
acknowledgements in the introduction.
The SAG, as the book is affectionately called, is one of the
corner stones of the Linux Documentation Project. ``We at the LDP feel
that we wouldn't be able to produce anything at all, that all our work
would be futile, if it weren't for the SAG,'' says Matt Welsh, directorof LDP, Inc.
The new version is still distributed freely, now even with a
copyright that allows modification. ``More dough,'' explains the author.
Despite insistent rumors about blatant commercialization, the SAG will
probably remain free. ``Even more dough,'' promises the author.
The author refuses to comment on Windows NT and Windows 96
versions, claiming not to understand what the question is about.
Industry gossip, however, tells that Bill Gates, co-founder and CEO of
Microsoft, producer of the Windows series of video games, has visited
Helsinki several times this year. Despite of this, Linus Torvalds,
author of the word processor Linux with which the SAG was written, is
not worried. ``We'll have world domination real soon now, anyway,'' he
explains, ``for 1.4 at the lastest.''
...
-- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi>
[comp.os.linux.announce]

Let the machine do the dirty work.
-- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie

LOGO for the Dead

LOGO for the Dead lets you continue your computing activities from
"The Other Side."

The package includes a unique telecommunications feature which lets you
turn your TRS-80 into an electronic Ouija board. Then, using Logo's
graphics capabilities, you can work with a friend or relative on this
side of the Great Beyond to write programs. The software requires that
your body be hardwired to an analog-to-digital converter, which is then
interfaced to your computer. A special terminal (very terminal) program
lets you talk with the users through Deadnet, an EBBS (Ectoplasmic
Bulletin Board System).

LOGO for the Dead is available for 10 percent of your estate
from NecroSoft inc., 6502 Charnelhouse Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44101.
&nb